It is only necessary to refer to his work, where he proves that education is one of those things which it is admissible in principle that a government should provide for the people, and that help in education is help towards doing without help, and is favourable to a spirit of independence.

I have made very little reference to the Royal Academy of Arts, the public institution of which I am the servant, and of what happened to it during this period. Why should this be?  The answer is that the Royal Academy offers a very different model to the role of institutionalisation to that which I have described. The Royal Academy is an institution not of the early Victorian period, but classically of the reign of George III. Founded in 1768, it was the result not of parliamentary action, but of the community of artists going privately to the King, and it was he — without the intervention or involvement of parliament — who asked them to draw up a set of rules for their operation and who agreed remarkably generously to pay off any debts it incurred, which he did consistently in the Academy's early years. In the 1830s, parliament was extremely irritated by the independence of the Royal Academy and it was attacked by writers such as George Foggo and the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, who viewed it as an instrument of private privilege, rather than of public benefit. The Royal Academy was wary of being incorporated into a new government building in Trafalgar Square as part of the National Gallery and felt that it was being co-opted by the state. Parliament asked for information about the finances to be laid before it and Sir Martin Archer Shee, the then president, simply refused. He regarded the Royal Academy as a private institution, which should not necessarily be subject to public regulation. When appearing before the Select Committee, he was sceptical that the creation of better premises for the National Gallery would necessarily produce an improvement in the state of art, describing it thus:

The Royal Academy [is] a much more important institution to the nation than the National Gallery; I look upon it that a garden is of more consequence than a granary; and you may heap up a hortus-siccus of art without producing any of the salutary effects which never fail to result from the operations of such a school as the Royal Academy.

In other words, the Royal Academy stuck two fingers up at those who believed in wider public access to the arts and felt that providing better facilities for its study would not necessarily improve its practice. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the process of the institutionalisation of art did greatly increase the public knowledge and interest in art, but did not necessarily improve its creative practice.