Forty Eight Hours

Take a walk along the Hastings seafront on a fine day and you can quickly see what drew Turner to this town.

The ‘painter of light’  - perhaps England’s favourite Romantic artist - would have found much to focus on his visits to this East Sussex town.

It was his visits and those of others like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Lear that founded Hastings’ reputation as an artistic colony.

See the real thing in Hastings

It’s through their work that you can get a glimpse of the town as it used to be  - and  there’s a chance at the moment to do just that.

Hastings Museum's latest acquisition, a watercolour painting by Turner entitled ‘Hastings: Fish Market on the Sands, Early Morning’  is now on display in the Old Town Museum.

You can get an expert view of the painting from the Museums curator, Victoria Williams, by looking at our film.

It shows fishermen and locals bargaining over the morning catch, an event which still takes place in the town today. But the backdrop shows a town which is entirely different to the modern Hastings.

The East Parade, Battery and Castle can be seen in the distance, but much of the seafront development is not yet built.

It also includes a hidden political point although, again, the point would not have been lost on its original audience. Two figures in Greek costume included as a reference to the Greek War of Independence which was widely supported in Britain at the time.