Postcard Royal Pavilion Brighton Great Kitchen aquatint Nash Bredon's

Postcard with a colour reproduction of an aquatint of the Great Kitchen in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, after the original plate in John Nash's Views of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, published in London in 1826. The card was published by K. J. Bredon's Bookshop at 10 East Street in Brighton, numbered 18 in a series, and printed in England. Below the image runs the caption The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, The Great Kitchen, followed by Aquatint from John Nash's Views of the Royal Pavilion. The card is unused and in very good condition.

The Great Kitchen was completed in 1816 as one of the first rooms of Nash's transformation and was regarded in its day as a technological feat, fitted with an open fire and a large smoke jack that allowed five spit-roasted meats to be cooked simultaneously, a high lantern with twelve sash windows for light and ventilation, and water pumped up from a nearby well. The most striking decorative element is the four cast iron columns crowned with painted copper palm leaves, a combination of structural function and exotic imagination that carries the palace's vocabulary into its service spaces. George IV usually escorted his guests through the kitchen in person, an unusual gesture at a time when service quarters were typically concealed. In 1816 he also brought the celebrated French chef Antonin Carême to Brighton, who stayed for a year and whose influence later led to the creation of five separate pastry and confectionery rooms. The card was published by Kenneth Bredon, owner of Bredon's Bookshop in Brighton and chairman of the Brighton and Hove Regency Society, probably in the 1950s or 1960s.