King George IV’s grand piano returns home to Brighton's Royal Pavilion

  • ITV Meridian's Andy Dickenson has been speaking to the team who were tasked with restoring the historic piano.

He's perhaps better-known for his fondness for wine and women than for song, but King George IV's piano made a triumphant return to his palace in Brighton today.

The grand piano, given to him more than two hundred years ago, will take pride of place in the Royal Pavilion - his palace by the sea.

It's been re-enamelled, re-varnished, and today re-tuned.

It's now worth in excess of the £230 that the King paid for it in the 1820s.

The piano was bought by the Royal Pavilion & Museums at auction on 6 April 2017.

The piano has not been played for 170 years. Credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

According to Brighton & Hove Museums the piano was made by Thomas Tomkison and is the most celebrated of his surviving works.

In a bill in the Royal Archives the piano is described as ‘An elegant rosewood grand piano inlaid with brass, the case highly polished, gilt mouldings, gilt turnbuckles and elegantly carved legs’.

The piano was well over twice the cost of a standard top quality English grand piano at the time, and accounts reveal that Tomkison supplied other ‘extra elegant’ pianos to the Prince Regent, but no others are known to have survived.

A detail of A C Pugin’s drawing of the Entrance Hall, c1821 Credit: Alexandra Loske, Curator, Royal Pavilion Archives

When the Pavilion was sold to Brighton in 1850, Queen Victoria stripped it of its contents which were taken to other royal palaces.

When it became clear that the Pavilion was not going to be demolished, Queen Victoria started returning fixtures and fittings.

This process has continued under successive monarchs. Occasionally items are acquired which have by various means left the Royal Collection.

These are acquired whenever resources allow by gift or purchase. It is not known when the Tomkison piano left the Royal Collection.

It is possible it was sold or disposed of by Queen Victoria because there is some evidence it may have been at Windsor Castle in the 1840s.

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