During the late 18th and early 19th century, there were many occasions when the government turned to the Royal Academy for advice. Many of the academicians were involved in the establishment of the Committee of Taste which was responsible for the erection of memorials to those who had distinguished themselves in fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. There was a public mood in support of appropriate forms of commemoration of the great military and naval victories of Nelson and Wellington, and memorials were set up throughout Britain designed by sculptors like Richard Westmacott who were specialists in the neoclassical style. Academicians helped support the establishment of the first public art gallery at Dulwich and academicians made the public case for the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the government as a way of improving public taste. Based at Somerset House, which was itself designed as, in Edmund Burke’s words, “a national building”, the RA operated alongside the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society and many of the offices of the civil service, including the Stamp Office, the Tax Office and the Navy Office. Here were the agencies of public policy in the arts, the sciences as well as the government of the navy.

So, what happened in the 1830s? The first thing was that the government decided to build a new, grand, neoclassical building right in the heart of Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament, to house, on the east side, the recently established National Gallery and, on the west side, to provide much larger and more publicly visible premises for the Royal Academy. I don’t think that historians have registered the formidable public symbolism involved in the Office of Works being commissioned to create a public building which, on its east side, was intended to contain the works of art from the past for the purposes of public instruction and, on its west side, the main institution for the training of artists. Architectural historians have always been critical of the National Gallery as a public building as being too long and low, and inadequately monumental, but the reason surely that it was designed in the way that it was is that it was planned in order to house not one but two separate public institutions. The length of its façade reflects this fact. It wasn’t quite the classical temple envisaged by John Nash for the centre of Trafalgar Square, but it was a visible manifestation of the commitment of government to the display of, and support for, the fine arts.

The Great Reform Bill of 1832 was a moment when the nature of government moved from being the concern of a relatively small, and largely London-based, oligarchic élite to a much wider-based and more democratic group. It brought into the House of Commons and into the activities of government a number of northern, more radical MPs, who wanted the government to give thought to how an effective system of art training could improve the quality of manufactures and who resented what they regarded as the monopolistic and restrictive system of teaching operated by the academy because it was, and always had been, dominated by ideals of high art, rather than practical design. These MPs, known as Philosophical Radicals, argued for a much wider definition of the role and responsibilities of government, a government which took seriously its cultural responsibilities for purposes of general education: some of their ideas were what we would regard as instrumental, powerfully influenced by the writings and ideas of the circle round Jeremy Bentham; but many of them were also idealistic, believing that it was possible for government to improve the living conditions and opportunities for learning of the population at large.