Royal Pavilion, Brighton

Dr Alexandra Loske is a British-German art historian, writer, and curator with a particular interest in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European art and architecture, specialising in the history of colour. She has been working at the University of Sussex since 1999, where she also studied art history and completed an AHRC-funded DPhil in 2014. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the use of colour and the application of colour theory in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Since 2014 Alexandra has been a curator at the Royal Pavilion. Since 2022 she has been the curator of the Royal Pavilion and Historic Properties at Brighton & Hove Museums.

“[A]dds a new dimension to our understanding of this extraordinary building. It makes me want to visit again, now with a greater appreciation and deeper understanding thanks to this careful study.”—Lee Prosser, Journal of Historic Buildings & Places“Combining original designs, prints and paintings with photographs of the Pavilion as it is now. The images of the designs allow the reader to see into the creative process, while the photographs of details of the Pavilion emphasise what a wonderful Gesamtkunstwerk it is.”—Emile de Bruijn, author of Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland“Alexandra Loske’s beautifully written, magisterial work on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton is itself a pleasure palace: deeply learned but also enchanting to read; not just on the flights of dragons, the eye-popping colour and the mutations of design, but more illuminatingly on contemporary taste in the Regency; how the fantasy by the sea was received and how this most delirious of projects was the creation of a British culture, far from insular but drunk on what is imagined to be oriental passions.”—Sir Simon Schama