The opening of the Royal Academy’s new building will give it back its original intellectual intent, as a place of thinking about art as well as exhibiting it

Roy Strong's diaries reveal an odd but witty and engaging character moving amidst high society

"Can we understand public artistic experience by considering it analogous to going to church: the search for the sacred; for the questioning of the meaning of existence?"

A lecture by Charles Saumarez Smith

The august institution was formed in the space of just ten days in late 1768 — and was born of a fierce professional rivalry

Art had hitherto been a free market, subject to the vagaries of public taste and the whims of private patronage. Then in the 1830s and 1840s parliament energetically went about bringing order, system and supervision to the realm of art. The question is: why?