One of the consequences of the Great Reform Bill was the establishment not long afterwards of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures under the auspices of the Board of Trade, which was set up in order to look at the question of how far the government could, and should, involve itself in the arts and in the training of artists, as well as investigating the strengths, and more especially the weaknesses, of the Royal Academy. Its purposes were to “enquire into the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design among the people (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country; also to enquire into the Constitution of the Royal Academy, and the effects produced by it”. It met in two stages, first in 1835, with a large and representative membership, and then in 1836 with a much-slimmed-down membership, which was regarded as an effective sleight of hand by William Ewart, the radical MP for Liverpool and its chairman, since it was now dominated by radicals, including Joseph Hume, MP for Manchester, John Bowring, the former editor of the Benthamite Westminster Review, and Thomas Wyse. The presumption behind the establishment of the committee and the beliefs of many of its more prominent members was that the government should be much more active and interventionist; that it should not just sit on its hands and allow for a laissez-faire political economy, but should set up museums and art schools and improve the quality of design in manufactured goods, and should expect to do so through the use of public institutions, regulated by parliament and through the expenditure of public money.

The establishment of the parliamentary select committee coincided with an increasing number of attacks in the press and from artists themselves. They argued that the Royal Academy itself needed to be reformed, that it was the preserve of a small coterie of artists rather than being representative, as was the Society of British Artists, of artists at large. It was accused of having “converted the republic of art into an aristocracy”. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the artist who had been a vocal critic of the academy ever since one of his large mythological pictures on the subject of Dentatus was moved into an outside room in the annual exhibition in 1809, attacked its failure to establish an effective school of history painting. He used the opportunities afforded him by a commission from Lord Grey to paint the Reform Banquet in the Guildhall to bend the ear of Whig MPs on the benefits of providing public money to support the practice of art. There was, simultaneously and certainly supported by Haydon, a movement in the House of Commons, led by William Ewart, demanding that, if the RA was to be housed at government expense in a new building in Trafalgar Square, then its affairs should be subject to effective government scrutiny. As Martin Archer Shee wrote in his two-volume biography of his father, Sir Martin Archer Shee, the then President of the Royal Academy: 

In the eyes of these gentlemen, the Academy was a royal or aristocratic institution to attack — an exclusive and privileged body to destroy. Its existence was an offence against commercial freedom and social equality. Its avowed object, its legitimate functions, and its acknowledged services, they were neither solicitous to examine nor qualified to appreciate.