The True Origins of the Royal Academy

December 2012

Describing what happened in the next three months was relatively plain sailing because it is all recorded in the early minutes of Council. I think that by now I had a reasonably clear view of the process which went into the writing of the Laws, which was that they had to be put together at some speed between the time when the four artists went to see the King and the day of the Royal Academy’s foundation, based on long-standing ideas and plans which had been first drawn up in 1749 and during the 1750s, when there had been repeated attempts to establish some form of academy. There followed a period of three months when the newly established Council talked about and discussed how the organisation would operate in detail, and in particular how the Royal Academy Schools would be run. I found that by writing about what happened as far as possible day-by-day one got a rather different feel for the way the organisation was established: not, as one might expect, all at once, but pragmatically, making up the rules as they went along. I also found that by establishing a chronological narrative, some aspects of the foundation, which are perfectly familiar, appeared differently. For example, Reynolds’s first Discourse, delivered on Monday, January 2, 1769, was not, as it is often described, a calm and considered set of reflections on the state of artistic practice but, on the contrary, had to be written at speed in the space of the fortnight over Christmas and in between a number of meetings of the Academy’s newly established Council. He did not have the time for calm reflection about the practice of art. And, although the letter has been previously published, I would like to think that the suggestion in a letter written by Joshua Sharpe, a lawyer in the Inner Temple, to Edmund Burke that Reynolds might have tried to resign in February is extremely likely to have been true. In fact, from the detailed narrative, it is quite clear that Reynolds needed quite a bit of convincing that the Royal Academy was a good idea, rather resented having been co-opted by royal fiat, and was upset that he was the only person not to be paid. This is quite different from the more traditional view of him as the éminence grise behind its establishment.

By the time I had got to March 1769 in describing what was happening in terms of the micro-politics of the weekly Council meetings, I felt that I had more or less accomplished what I had originally set out to do. On Friday, March 17, Council ordered the Laws to be printed, together with all the by-laws as an appendix. Only one copy survives in the Royal Academy’s archive. This was the original blueprint for the organisation, which I had wanted to understand. But, at this point, I recognised that there was a fundamental weakness in what I had done. It’s all very well to study a historical process—in this case, the establishment of a historically important organisation—through a day-by-day description as to exactly what happened. You gain an understanding of the texture of events, the extent to which they are contingent and accidental—the sense of a historical process as a process, which can be reconstructed and, to an extent, deconstructed. But, at the same time, of course, you lose the longer perspective, the sense that events are not arbitrary, but are, at least to some extent, predetermined. In order to understand the micro-narrative, you needed some understanding of the many previous attempts to establish an academy and of the different types of artists’ organisations which had been set up in England throughout the first half of the 18th century before the Society of Artists was formed in 1761. Luckily or unluckily (I’m never entirely sure which) I had been asked the previous year to give a lecture about the establishment of the Royal Academy in which I had chosen to do it through the longue durée, going back to Renaissance Italy and to the establishment of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1593. So, I had a ready-made introduction, lightly covering the previous two centuries of artists’ academies in order to provide a prelude to the évènements of 1768.

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