There are various accounts as to how Shee performed in front of the committee, a number of them hostile, including, not surprisingly, Haydon, who described in his diary how he “entered into a rambling defence and was repeatedly called to order by Ewart . . . He accused the evidence of being personal and partial . . . Rennie jumped up and denied it, and was called to order.”

But both the official record and Shee’s biography imply that Shee was pretty self-possessed and made a good case for the academy. He was remembered by his fellow academicians as having the skills of a lawyer, as well as being a good writer, and he argued, as he had argued in previous discussions with the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, in submissions regarding the importance of housing the Royal Academy in the new building in Trafalgar Square and in making the case for withholding information from parliament, that the Royal Academy was essentially a private institution, answerable to the crown only, and not to parliament.

From this point onwards, the Royal Academy retreated to a position, as Shee had argued, of being a private institution, self-governing, administered according to the requirements of its own laws, but not answerable to the government. Individual academicians might be, and indeed were, involved in the establishment of the government Schools of Design in a committee which included Sir Francis Chantrey, an RA, Charles Cockerell, a recently-elected RA, and Charles Eastlake, who was later to be president of the RA, but the academy’s own School remained resolutely independent, not subject to the jurisdiction of the government schools, not accredited by government or the Department of Education and Science and its successor bodies to this day, but, instead, self-regulated.  

The RA could, at this moment in its history, have become a more public body responsible for the regulation of the newly- established Schools of Design. It might have had a role later in the century in the establishment of the London art colleges. It might have become the representative body for artists as the Royal Institute of British Architects was to be for architects. It chose not to be, to remain private, and to exercise its influence through individual members rather than institutionally.

Just as the Royal Academy retreated into being a more private institution, interested in serving the commercial and purely artistic interests of its members, so the country as a whole moved in the other direction: setting up museums in provincial cities;  establishing a widespread system of art education;  believing that access to art, and the enjoyment of art, should be open to every citizen. One can perhaps characterise these changes during the 1830s as, on the one hand, the retreat of a private institution founded in the 18th-century enlightenment and dedicated to the highest ideals in the practice of art; and, on the other hand, the advance of a more didactic and  democratic public culture, advancing the rights of the citizen and the duties of government.