Of course, this system is not so unusual in organisations and learned societies. There are versions of it in other equivalent organisations founded before the Royal Academy, like the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. But, in the case of the Royal Academy—and this was the issue which interested me most of all—the exact way in which the system was planned to operate was established and laid out in a set of rules in the space of just over ten days between Monday, November 28, 1768, when four people went to visit King George III in St James’s Palace to talk about the idea of establishing a Royal Academy, and Saturday, December 10, 1768, when 28 artists returned to St James’s Palace to celebrate the new institution’s foundation. How on earth was it that an entire organisation, which has lasted nearly 250 years, was dreamed up and devised, with all its attendant rules of procedure, in the space of just over ten days? Who wrote the rules? How and why did they devise them in the way that they did?

So, at a table looking out over the mountains of Snowdonia, I sat down to try to work out the answer, at least for my own benefit. I put down the date November 28, 1768 in large letters onto a document on my word processor and wrote out what I thought had happened that day, who were the four people who went to see the King, something of their nature, experience and personality, why they thought it might be a good idea to establish a Royal Academy, and to speculate on what the King is likely to have said in reply. I stuck as far as I could to the facts as I knew them. I resisted any temptation I might have had (I never actually was tempted) to introduce false dialogue or to embroider the facts as they are known. But I did very much want to establish, at least in my own mind, and I hope now in that of the reader, the personality and motivation of those people who were involved.

As soon as I had written out what happened on November 28, 1768, I realised that it was completely impossible to understand why that group of four people—the architect, William Chambers, the young American painter, Benjamin West, the much older Swiss artist and teacher, George Michael Moser, and the fashionable court painter, Francis Cotes—had managed to obtain an audience with the King without understanding the circumstances which had led up to their visit and the quarrel which had split the so-called Society of Artists, the professional organisation which had been founded in 1761 and was the immediate predecessor of the Royal Academy. At this point, I should confess that, in putting together a bag of books to take with me on holiday, I hadn’t managed to locate in the disorder of my study Matthew Hargrave’s absolutely admirable and definitive book on the Society of Artists, published under the title Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 and, in retrospect rather stupidly, I was too mean to order a duplicate. So, I began to try to work out on the basis of my rather fragmentary and incomplete notes the exact set of circumstances, again as far as possible day-by-day, which had led William Chambers to march out of a meeting of the Society of Artists in a great rage on Friday, November 4, 1768. In this, I was guided not so much by detailed research on the surviving archive of the Society of Artists, which Matthew undertook for his doctorate, but by a knowledge, which I have myself experienced, as to how a group of artists can get incredibly upset and angry about issues concerned with hierarchy, where their works are hung in exhibitions, and who holds authority in any organisation which in any way represents their professional interests and, by implication, their status. It could be that this is true of any professional organisation and it is just possible that the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society in the 18th century were as full of friction, feuds and professional in-fighting as was the Society of Artists. But I doubt it. There seems to have been something special about artists in the 1760s: the numbers of them who were involved in the Society of Artists; their professional jealousies; and the differences of opinion between the younger and more ambitious artists, who were interested in new types of subject matter, and the older and more established artists, who the younger ones felt were hogging all the best positions in their annual exhibitions and were keeping power in a small group without allowing the younger artists to be represented among the so-called Directors of the Society.