MUSEUM bosses have splashed out several grand on a grand, securing a key purchase likely to strike a chord with visitors.

King George IV’s only surviving grand piano has been bought at auction and could go on display at the Royal Pavilion as early as this Easter weekend.

The Royal Pavilion and Museums Foundation supported the successful £62,000 purchase, with funding from the Art Fund, Arts Council England, Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund and The Leche Trust.

The piano, commissioned for the Royal Pavilion by George IV in 1821, was made by Thomas Tomkison and is the most celebrated of his surviving works.

The item has long been on the wishlist of museum bosses who wanted to return the instrument to its rightful home.

The piano maker was renowned for his flamboyant approach to case decoration which is thought to have appealed to the monarch’s Francophile and adventurous tastes.

The piano, described as an elegant, rosewood grand, is extravagantly decorated, inlaid with brass, with gilt mouldings and gilt turnbuckles, and has elegantly carved legs.

At a cost of £236 5 shillings, the piano was well over twice the cost of a standard top quality English grand piano at the time.

Accounts reveal that Tomkison supplied other “extra elegant” pianos to the Prince Regent but no others are thought to have survived.

A print published in Nash’s Views of the Royal Pavilion from five years after the purchase shows the piano in the entrance hall of the Royal Pavilion.

When the pavilion was sold to Brighton for £50,000 in 1850, Queen Victoria stripped it of its contents for her other royal palaces but started returning fixtures and fittings at a later date – a process which has continued under successive monarchs.

It is not known when the Tomkison piano left the royal collection though it is thought it might have been sold by Queen Victoria after a spell in Windsor Castle in the 1840s.

Cllr Alan Robins, economic development and culture committee chairman, said: “Prince Regent’s piano has long been on a wish list of desirable assets for the Royal Pavilion, so we’re thrilled to be bringing it back to its rightful home.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire it for a public collection so we’re over the moon to have secured it for the benefit of the city and our visitors.

“The piano is playable but as it’s been dormant for 20 years iy will need some restoration.

“It would be amazing to be able to hear music of the period played on it.”