At the committee hearings, it was pointed out that there were plenty of 18th-century artists, including Sir Joshua Reynolds himself, as well as Richard Wilson, James Barry and John Flaxman, who had managed to become artists perfectly well without the benefits of an academy training. Not surprisingly, representatives of the broader-based Society of British Artists felt that the academy was unhelpful in the way that it monopolised the system of honours for artists. There was a strong feeling on the part of the academicians that the committee asked first for evidence to be given by those who were known to be hostile to it, including the artists John Martin and Benjamin Robert Haydon, and only afterwards asked the president, secretary and treasurer to appear before it. Adversaries of the academy attacked all aspects of the way it operated, the way members were elected, the extent to which academicians dominated its annual exhibition, and the state of the Royal Academy Schools.

Haydon, the most consistently vocal and effective of the academy’s adversaries, was asked if it was governed by charter “like other public bodies”.   He answered:

No; they only exist by the royal pleasure; they cunningly refused George the Fourth’s offer of a charter, fearing it would make them responsible; they are a private society, which they always put forward when you wish to examine them, and they always proclaim themselves a public society when they want to benefit by any public vote.

He was asked what he most disapproved of in the academy, surely itself an indication of the prejudices of the select committee. He answered:

Its exclusiveness, its total injustice . . . The artists are at the mercy of a despotism whose unlimited power tends to destroy all feeling for right or justice; forty men do as they please, it is the fact; the people have an appeal constitutionally, but the artists have no appeal; the academy is a House of Lords without appeal. It is an anomaly in the history of any constitutional people, the constitution of this academy; I cannot conceive how it could have been framed, upon investigating it. It is extraordinary how men, brought up as Englishmen, could set up such a system of government.

On June 15, 1836, Sir Martin Archer Shee was at long last invited to respond as president. Haydon recorded in his diary: “This day thou knowest what is to happen. O God, I ask only for justice and truth to triumph.” Shee was, not surprisingly, on the back foot. His son, who was a lawyer, describes his father’s state of mind when facing the committee.

Sir Martin had watched, with feelings of just indignation, the partial character of the proceedings, and the anti-academic spirit that marked the whole course of the inquiry. It may, therefore, be easily imagined that, in obeying the summons of the committee, he was in no mood to conciliate their favour, or deprecate their hostility, by meekness of tone or deferential placidity of demeanour. He was little solicitous to disguise his strong sense of the injustice exhibited towards the Academy, in the eagerness with which the committee had invited the attacks of its assailants, and encouraged the vague and senseless vituperation which, in their evidence, supplied the place of authentic statement or specific charge.