The opening of the Royal Academy Schools last night reminded me that when I first went to the Academy in 2007, I was asked to give a talk to the alumni about the Schools. I suspect it was a test as to whether or not I was going to be a supporter of the Schools which I would have been even without the test.
Someone told me yesterday that they had been reading what I have written about the Schools, but this lecture was never published, so I am putting it on my blog now. I am sure much has been published since, including my book The Company of Artists, but it looks as if it might contain information which is still relevant:-
Ladies and gentlemen,
Some time last year I was asked by Alison Jensen as to who would be the most appropriate person to give a lecture on the Royal Academy Schools to the Art Workers Guild. I wasn’t really sure and, since I have myself become interested in the early history of the Royal Academy and how it has operated historically, and since I have found that one of the things which is attractive and interesting about the Royal Academy as an institution is precisely the way in which it is in part — a part which is not really sufficiently well known — a postgraduate art school, I rather rashly volunteered myself as a way of teaching myself, as well as others, about its history.
It is one of the aspects about the Royal Academy which I have found most intriguing and least well known that nearly half of it is devoted to the Schools, essentially replicating the more public area of the exhibition galleries, but on the basement floor. So, what I want to try to do is to try to trace the early history of the Royal Academy Schools, how they came into being, and what was the content and influence of what was taught: in other words, what was special about the Royal Academy Schools in the early days of the Royal Academy and what was the influence of its teaching on the nature of art practice in the late eighteenth century.
The establishment of the Royal Academy Schools was far from being the first time that efforts had been made in order to ensure the professional training of artists in London. Stretching right back to the court of Charles I, there had been a recognition that England needed somewhere where artists could receive a proper training in drawing – access to life models, as well as to casts in order to learn to draw from the antique, and a more general opportunity to study, and learn from, works of art of the past either from prints or, ideally, through access to paintings.
Not long after the Restoration, John Evelyn, who had travelled extensively on the continent during the Commonwealth and had the ear of the King after the Restoration on issues both scientific and more practical, proposed in his book Sculptura that an academy should be established for the general encouragement of art. He wrote that it would require the purchase of a house ‘with a sufficient number of rooms: two contiguous to each other for drawing and modelling from life; one for architecture and perspective, one for drawing from plaster; one for receiving the works of the school; one for the exhibition of them; and others for a housekeeper and servants’; he suggested that the best students should be appointed to fellowships which would enable them to study in Rome; and ‘That drawing-masters for such schools as may be wanted in several parts of the kingdom be appointed by the professors, under the seal of the Academy’. In other words, the sorts of ideas which led to the establishment of the Royal Academy long antedated it and may have been pioneered by John Evelyn in the circle of savants which surrounded the early days of the Royal Society.
During the late seventeenth century, the efforts to establish places where drawing was taught were admittedly pretty haphazard and tended towards providing facilities for those who were already practicing as artists, as seems to be the case with Sir Peter Lely’s so-called ‘Academy’, which he set up next door to his studio in the north-east corner of Covent Garden piazza, just by where the back door now is into the Royal Opera House. But in 1681, a Huguenot, Peter d’Agar, presumably the brother of the portrait painter, Charles d’Agar, opened a school which apparently offered some level of teaching of both painting and drawing and, in 1692, Marshall Smith in his book Art of Painting described how artists were known diligently to study nudity at the Academy. Five years later, in 1697, Bernard Lens and an engraver, John Sturt, apparently opened a ‘Drawing-School near the Hand and Pen in St. Paul’s Church-Yard’ and, the following year, Narcissus Luttrell recorded in his diary how ‘His Majestie — that is, William III — is resolved to settle an academy to encourage the art of painting, where are to be 12 masters, and all persons that please may come and practice gratis’. A teaching staff of twelve suggests a fairly ambitious operation and is evidence that, even in the late seventeenth century, the teaching of art was taken pretty seriously, even if these initiatives didn’t in the long term amount to much and are scarcely remembered except in the specialist literature of late seventeenth-century painting.
The next occasion when efforts were made to open an academy of painting and drawing was when Godfrey Kneller and many of the other leading artists of the day took over a dilapidated house in Great Queen Street in Covent Garden, which was by now well established as a neighbourhood for artists and the luxury trades, in October 1711. Everyone who was anyone was involved, including Giovanni-Antonio Pellegrini, who was busy doing ceiling paintings for Vanbrugh’s country houses, Louis Laguerre, who had worked at Chatsworth, Michael Dahl, a dull, but competent portrait painter from Stockholm, and the young James Thornhill, who was by the standards of these artists relatively well born, coming from a landed family in Dorset and the great-nephew of Thomas Sydenham. What was actually taught at Kneller’s academy remains unclear and it may have been at least as much an opportunity for the leading artists of the day to meet and fraternize — this was always one aspect of these artists’ clubs — as it was a proper teaching establishment. But Vertue at least describes it as a ‘place for drawing’ and Nicolas Dorigny, a French artist, apparently talked about the importance of the Raphael Cartoons, which he was then engraving.
That this early academy lacked the requisite facilities for the teaching of art is implied in a passage of Jonathan Richardson’s Science of a Connoisseur, published in 1719, in which he described what a real academy might consist of. It’s an interesting passage, worth quoting in full:
…if our nobility and gentry were lovers and connoisseurs, public encouragement and assistance would be given to the art: academies would be set up, well regulated, and the government of them put into such hands, as would not want authority to maintain those lands, without which no society can prosper, or long subsist. These academies would then be well provided of all necessaries for instruction in geometry, perspective and anatomy, as well as designing; for without a competent proficiency in the three former, no considerable progress can be made in the other. They would then be furnished with good masters to direct the students, and good drawing and figures, whether casts or originals, antique or modern for their imitation. Nor should these be considered merely as schools or nurseries for the painters and sculptors, and other artists of that kind, but as places for the better education of gentlemen, and to complete the civilizing and polishing of our people, as our other schools and universities and the other means of instruction are.
In other words, training in the practice of art was regarded as something which was not only desirable on professional grounds, as a way of improving its practice, but also as a way of giving the gentry a better knowledge of art as connoisseurs.
The year after the publication of Richardson’s book, two artists, Louis Chéron and John Vanderbank, opened another academy in an old meeting house in Peter’s Court off St. Martin’s Lane, where they provided an opportunity to draw not only from male models, but from female as well. There is some evidence, also, that William Cheselden, the surgeon, was taught to draw at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy and simultaneously provided instruction in anatomy in classes which were held nearby in Crane Court off Fleet Street. Anyone could join the classes at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy providing they paid a fee of two guineas, a not inconsiderable sum, which allowed them to join for a season lasting from October through to the spring. In an advertisement published in October 1722, it was advertised as an ‘Academy for the Improvement of Painters and Sculptors by drawing from the naked’.
Now it is possible to trace the activities of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy right through to the 1760s, including many other initiatives, variously successful, to establish academies of one sort or another. But, having, I hope, demonstrated that many of the activities of the Royal Academy Schools antedated their establishment, I want to skip a bit through to the circumstances of the 1760s and to the situation surrounding how and when the Royal Academy Schools were set up. What, if anything, differentiated them from these previous initiatives ?
The history of the establishment of the Royal Academy itself is well recorded and has been described many times in books and articles. But the history of the establishment of the Royal Academy Schools is slightly more complicated only from the fact that it was not really a new foundation, but took over facilities which were already established. What happened was as follows. In June 1767, a year and a half before the foundation of the Royal Academy, George Michael Moser, the Swiss artist and silver-chaser, who had long been associated with teaching at St. Martin’s Lane, established a new academy, which was actually called ‘The Royal Academy’, in a print warehouse, previously Lambe’s auction rooms, on the south side of Pall Mall on the site now occupied by the Institute of Directors opposite the Athenaeum. Moser apparently informed those artists who were paid up as members of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy that the new academy would be free and, on those grounds, was allowed to remove all the casts and other equipment, described as ‘anatomical figures, bustoes, statues, lamps and other effects’, from St. Martin’s Lane. But it turned out not to be true. The idea that the patronage of the King would enable it to be free was a chimera and, instead, artists were required to contribute a guinea each.
Moser announced his intentions to the Incorporated Society of Artists on 2 June 1767 as follows:
Resolved, that the resolution that the Directors should proceed to consider of a form for instituting a public academy be repealed, his Majesty having been graciously pleased to declare his royal intention of taking the Academy under his protection.
Apparently ‘The label over the door containing the print ware-house was reazed, and another substituted in its place, viz. the royal academy’. In other words, there was already a place advertising itself as a royal academy before the Royal Academy was established by royal charter a year and a half later. And the Royal Academy, when it was set up, simply took over the premises in Pall Mall which already existed and which had already been furnished with all the paraphernalia of casts and anatomical figures, which were required for the purposes of teaching.
How then did the Schools come into being as a more formal part of the Royal Academy as a whole ? The original idea for the establishment of the Royal Academy was owing at least as much to the need to have somewhere for artists to exhibit their work on an annual basis, alongside the exhibitions which had been organized since 1760 by the Incorporated Society of Artists, as it was to have somewhere to teach the next generation of artists. But when a small group of artists, led by the architect, William Chambers, who had been tutor to the King in the 1750s, approached George III in November 1768 asking him if he would be willing to confer his authority and patronage on a new and more genuinely royal art establishment, it was expected to concentrate on both objectives: both an annual exhibition of art for the benefit of the public; and on the teaching of the next generation of artists. Or, as the artists themselves described in their petition dated 28 November 1768
It would be intruding too much upon your Majesty’s time to offer a minute detail of our plan. We only beg leave to inform your Majesty, that the two principal objects we have in view are, the establishing a well-regulated School or Academy of Design, for the use of students in the Arts, and an Annual Exhibition, open to all artists of distinguished merit, where they may offer their performances to public inspection, and acquire that degree of reputation and encouragement which they shall be deemed to deserve.
The king, who had a fairly legalistic cast of mind, asked the artists to draw up a fairly formal constitution which would describe in detail what they proposed and would provide a set of rules for the Royal Academy’s operation. These rules survive and form the basis of the Laws by which the Royal Academy still operates. Amongst Instrument of Foundation was the requirement that
There shall be a Keeper of the Royal Academy, elected by ballot, from amongst the Academicians; he shall be an able Painter of History, Sculptor or other Artist, properly qualified. His business shall be to keep the Royal Academy with the Models, Casts, Books, and other Moveables belonging thereto; to attend regularly the Schools of Design, during the sittings of the Students, to preserve order among them, and to give them such advice and instruction as they shall require.
The person who was appointed Keeper at the first meeting of the so-called General Assembly on 14 December 1768 was, perhaps not surprisingly, George Michael Moser, who had had a long involvement in teaching, ever since he had arrived in London in 1726, had previously operated a private academy in Salisbury Court, which involved drawing a living model by lamplight, had been one of the artists who had proposed the establishment of an academy to the Society of Dilettanti in the 1750s, and had accompanied William Chambers when he went to see the King. Three days later, on 17 December 1768, four Professors were appointed. There duties were to give public lectures not specifically for the students in the Schools (they were Professors of the Royal Academy as a whole), but inevitably the students attended the lectures and benefitted from them. They were:- Edward Penny, the historical painter, became Professor of Painting; Thomas Sandby (not William Chambers) became Professor of Architecture, although he was not particularly active as an architect, but perhaps it was more owing to his close association to the King as deputy ranger of Windsor Great Park; Samuel Wale, who was chiefly known as a book illustrator, became Professor of Perspective; and Dr. William Hunter, the great Scottish physician, was Professor of Anatomy Anatomy.
Looking back at the circumstances of foundation of the Royal Academy, what seems to have been distinctive was not so much the ideas and aspirations which lay behind it, since these had pre-existed it by at least a hundred years in England and longer on the continent, but more the formality with which it was established, the sense of constitutional propriety, and this was owing to the personality and temperament, as well as the direct support, of the King. It was expected to abide by rules, not least to avoid the fractiousness which had bedeviled all previous efforts to establish an academy and to prevent the risk of financial impropriety, since the King was personally liable for any debts. The early minutes of the Council indicate the care which was paid to all the arrangements.
Indeed, there was an incredible amount of regulation in the early meetings of the Council of the Royal Academy, which seems to have sat nearly daily in the lead-up to the admission of students in January 1769. On 28th. December 1768, it was agreed that those people who were already registered at the previous, so-called ‘Old Academy’ in Pall Mall should be allowed to transfer to the new academy and, two days later, there was further discussion about the responsibilities of the Keeper, who was expected to work alongside the so-called Visitors, who were appointed annually from amongst the members of the Royal Academy to teach in the life academy, but the Keeper retained seniority. The Keeper was also the person responsible for examining prospective students, submitting their work for approval by Council, issuing tickets for the students to work in the library, and overseeing the arrangements for discipline. At the same meeting, it was agreed that four models of different characters should be provided by the Keeper and Visitors; each model was to receive five shillings per week as a retaining fee and to have the additional pay of one shilling for each night employed; and dates were set in October for the public lectures by the various Professors, including an agreement that Dr. Hunter should be allowed to give his lectures at his own convenience only providing that the lectures started at 3 p.m. — presumably in order to allow the best use of daylight.
In 1769, the first students were admitted to the schools of the Royal Academy. 77 — a very considerable number, indeed far more than are admitted now — were allowed to enter the new Royal Academy Schools during their first year of operation: 36 painting students; 10 sculpture students; 3 for architecture and 4 for engraving, with the remainder unspecified. They included quite a number who later became well known: for example, John Bacon and Thomas Banks, both of whom became well-known sculptors; Richard Cosway, the worldly and effete miniaturist; Francis Wheatley, the painter; John Yenn, the architect and pupil of William Chambers; Joseph Farington, whose diaries are such an invaluable source of information for the later history of the Royal Academy; and John Flaxman. It’s a pretty impressive list of artists who were presumably attracted by the opportunity which a more formal programme of teaching allowed and were stimulated by being the first students in a newly-established programme and by a much more competitive environment for the practice of art.
What, then, were the principal components of the teaching offered by the Royal Academy Schools ? Elias Martin, a Swedish-born artist who had studied under Joseph Vernet in Paris, and who enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools in 1769 as one of its very first students, painted the students at work drawing from casts of well-known antique statues in a deeply sepulchral light. Indeed, drawing from the antique lay at the heart of the curriculum and the supervision of the so-called Antique School lay in the hands of the Keeper.
Alongside the discipline of drawing from the antique was the requirement to learn to draw from a living model, which was supervised by the system of Visitors, each of whom was put in charge of the School for a month, a system which was controversial, but at least meant that the students received the benefit of a great variety of different types and styles of instruction. As G.D. Leslie remarked much later, reflecting back on the benefits of this method of teaching, ‘it is both refreshing and very instructive to an artist of experience occasionally to spend a month in helping, in any way that he thinks possible, young students in their work; bestowing, if he is wise, most of his attention on those whose works show marked ability and intelligence’.
Alongside the discipline of learning to draw, day-in, day-out, there was the intellectual stimulus of being in an environment where ideas about art and discussions about its aims and ambitions were central to its practice. On the 2nd. January 1769, Joshua Reynolds gave the first of his great Discourses, which were expected to provide his ideas and reflections about the nature of art. He began in an appropriately orotund way:
GENTLEMEN,
An Academy, in which the Polite Arts may be regularly cultivated, is at last opened among us by Royal Munificence. This must appear an event in the highest degree interesting, not only to the Artists, but to the whole nation.
It is indeed difficult to give any other reason, why an Empire like that of BRITAIN, should so long have wanted an ornament so suitable to its greatness, than that slow progression of things, which naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence and power.
But he went on to reflect on some of the practicalities of teaching, including the need to be able to study ‘authentick models’; the benefits of studying alongside other students, since ‘it is generally found, that a youth more easily receives instruction from the companions of his studies, whose minds are nearly on a level with his own, than from those who are much his superiors’; the need to establish ‘an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art’; and the importance of being suspicious of any easy facility in drawing. Hard work is what is advocated: hard work and close attention to drawing from the living model. The most important point that Reynolds makes he leaves to the end:
I must beg leave to submit one thing more to the consideration of the Visitors, which appears to me a matter of very great consequence, and the omission of which I think a principal defect in the method of education pursued in all the Academies I have ever visited. The error I mean is, that the Students never draw exactly from the living models which they have before them. It is not indeed their intention; nor are they directed to do it. Their drawings resemble the model only in the attitude. They change the form according to their vague and uncertain ideas of beauty, and make a drawing rather of what they think the figure ought to be than of what it appears.
Hard work and close empirical observation was the route to creativity in Reynolds’s estimation. After the lecture, they all went off to the local pub and sang songs and recited odes about the Royal Academy and their gratitude to the King.
What I think is impressive about the history of the Royal Academy Schools is the extent to which the essence of the system of teaching was established during the first year of its operation and carried on pretty much in the same way till 1836 when the Schools moved to the east side of the newly-built National Gallery. In November 1769, Council established the system by which the students were to be examined and how, for the premiums, subjects were written onto a piece of paper ‘out of which one shall be drawn by any One of the Candidates in the Presence of the President, Keeper and Secretary, half an hour before they begin to make their Designs’. On 11th. December 1769, on the anniversary of its foundation, the academicians held a so-called General Assembly, Reynolds delivered the second of his Discourses, and prizes were given out to the best of the students.
What then changed in the system of teaching in the next nearly seventy years ? In 1770, the library was established under the auspices of Francis Hayman, then in his early sixties. In 1771, George III provided quarters in old Somerset House for the Schools, including space for the antique and life classes, the library and a lecture room. The layout of the lecture room was extremely hierarchical: the President at the front, flanked on his right by the Keeper and Treasurer and, on his left, by the Secretary, the same formation as holds for meetings of Council now. In 1772, Thomas Rowlandson was admitted as a student and was soon afterwards reprimanded for shooting at one of the female models with his peashooter. There were obviously tensions between the Keeper and the Visitors because Council had to legislate in November 1772, ordering the Keeper to keep to instruction in the so-called ‘Plaister Academy’, leaving the Visitors to teach from the life. In 1773, the Schools were presented with casts of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. In 1774, arrangements were made for prize students to spend up to three years in either Italy or Greece, paid for by a gift of four thousand pounds from the Society of Dilettanti.
The biggest change was the decision made by the Office of Works in 1774 to reconstruct Old Somerset House and use part of the new building — that part which lay nearest to the gate onto the Strand — as purpose-built accommodation for the Royal Academy, with the Life School on the ground floor off to the right of the vestibule and the Antique School upstairs next door to the library and council room. Now, at least, the Royal Academy had purpose-built premises, a bit cramped perhaps with large numbers of students crowded into relatively small rooms drawing from the model, but suitably grand for the aspirations of a royal foundation. They moved into their new premises in October 1780 and Reynolds delivered the ninth of his Discourses on the occasion, in which he described how
The honour which the arts acquire by being permitted to take possession of this noble habitation, is one of the most considerable of the many instances we have received of his Majesty’s protection, and the strongest proof of his desire to make the Academy respectable.
The young Thomas Lawrence entered the Schools as a student in 1788. Exceptionally handsome as a young man, it was said that ‘His personal attractions were as remarkable as his talents; altogether he excited a great sensation, and seemed to the admiring students as nothing less than a young Raffaelle, suddenly dropped among them’. Two years later, the young Joseph Mallord William Turner was enrolled. By now the approach of the students to the tasks of painting was slightly different: more cavalier; slightly less learned; they probably regarded the ideas of the very elderly Joshua Reynolds, now nearly blind as well as deaf, as pretty antediluvian. On 10 December 1790, he rose to deliver his fifteenth and final, valedictory Discourse. He at times sounds nearly apologetic. But, in the end, he is able to congratulate himself that
In reviewing my Discourses, it is no small satisfaction to be assured that I have, in no part of them, lent my assistance to foster newly-hatched unfledged opinions, or endeavoured to support paradoxes, however tempting may have been their novelty, or however ingenious, I might, for the minute, fancy them to be.
He underlines the words newly-hatched and unfledged, expressing thereby his contempt for new ideas, preferring the tried and tested ways of following the art of the past and drawing from the antique.
But new ideas were beginning to take hold in the Royal Academy, not least in the Schools and when John Francis Rigaud entered the Schools in 1792, he found a climate of radicalism, describing later in his life how
I shudder at the recollection of the scenes I there witnessed;—the peaceable students in the Antique Academy being continually interrupted in their studies by others of an opposite character, who used to stand up and spout forth torrents of indecent abuse against the King, and [against] all that was sacred…one evening when they were particularly violent, I could stand it no longer…and protested that if they continued to use such abominable language in a Royal Academy I would denounce every one of them to the Council, and procure their expulsion.
Joseph Wilton, the Keeper, complained to Joseph Farington that the students used to throw bread pellets at one another instead of using it to rub out their sketches and so bread was banned.
I am going to end this description of the eighteenth-century Royal Academy Schools by doing two things. The first is to consider the impact that Henry Fuseli had on the teaching in the Schools on his election as Keeper in 1805; and the second is to provide a set of broader reflections on the nature and character of what was taught in the Royal Academy Schools and how it might be viewed from the perspective of the twenty-first century.
First, Fuseli. Fuseli’s predecessor as Keeper, Joseph Wilton had been a smooth, knowledgeable, refined sculptor, one of the founders of the Royal Academy and deeply inculcated in its thinking. At the time of his election as Keeper in November 1790, he was something of a new broom, tightening up regulations, ensuring that the Schools operated in the ways that they had been established to. When Fuseli was elected as Keeper in 1805, he came from a rather different universe. He was short, aggressive, prone to swearing, believed in the benign neglect of students, and was profoundly much more interested in the subject matter of art than its practice. Benjamin Robert Haydon described his impact on the teaching in the Schools:
He had a strong Swiss accent, and a guttural energetic diction. This was not affected in him. He swore roundly, a habit which he told me he had contracted from Dr. Armstrong. He was about five feet five inches high, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb, but kept it upon his stone, and being very near-sighted, and too vain to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or blue, as it might be, and plaster it over a shoulder or face. Sometimes, in his blindness, he would put a hideous smear of Prussian blue in his flesh, and then, perhaps, discovering his mistake, take a bit of red to deaden it, then prying close in, turn round to me and say, ‘By Gode, dat’s a fine purple ! it’s very like Correggio, by Gode !’ and then, all of a sudden, he would burst out with a quotation from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or perhaps the Nibelungen, and thunder round to me with ‘paint dat’. I found him the most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, infidelity, profanity, and kindness. He put me in mind of Archimago in Spenser. Weak minds he destroyed. They mistook his wit for reason, his indelicacy for breeding, his swearing for manliness, and his infidelity for strength of mind: but he was accomplished in elegant literature, and had the art of inspiring young minds with high and grand views. I told him I would never paint portraits, – but devote myself to High Art. ‘Keep to dat !’ said Fuseli, looking fiercely at me: ‘I will, sir’. We were more intimate from that hour.
What Fuseli succeeded in doing was shifting the teaching of the Schools away from the traditional practice of concentrating on drawing, on technique, towards a more literary approach to subject matter. Haydon was not alone in being influenced by Fuseli to strive for greatness in his art. George Leslie provides a more measured, but essentially similar analysis of Fuseli’s impact on the Schools, looking back on his impact fifty years later:
I had hoped for much advantage from studying under such a master, but he said little in the Academy. He generally came into the room once in the course of every evening, and rarely came without a book in his hand. He would take any vacant place among the students, and sit reading nearly the whole of the time he stayed with us. I believe he was right. For those students who are born with powers that will make them eminent, it is sufficient to place fine works of art before them. They do not want instruction, and those who do are not worth it. Art may be learnt, but can’t be taught. Under Fuseli’s wise neglect, Wilkie, Mulready, Etty, Landseer, and Haydon distinguished themselves, and were the better for not being made all alike by teaching, if indeed that could have been done.
So, now, by way of conclusion, it is worth considering what were the strengths and weaknesses of the eighteenth-century system of teaching? The traditional system of academic teaching in art schools is now regarded as ridiculously constraining, not necessarily having anything to offer modern practice. But at the time that the Royal Academy Schools were established in the 1760s, it is easy to see that artists were keen to have some sense of discipline to the way students were trained and a more settled view of professional standards. They established the system of training with care. Drawings had to be submitted to Council before a student was admitted to the Schools. They then had to learn the basics as to how to draw from the antique before being allowed to proceed to drawing from the living model. It was quite a tough discipline with strict hours, an examination which consisted of drawing from a subject, and prizes.
There are two things which are impressive about the early history of the Royal Academy Schools. The first is the sense of competition. Students were working in close proximity — going off to William Hunter’s anatomy classes together, sitting alongside one another as they were drawing, studying together. There was a community of interest. The second impressive thing is the amount of interest that the older artists took in the younger. The system of Visitors meant that all the older generation of Royal Academicians would take their turn in undertaking a month’s teaching in the Life School. They all met together at the lectures which were given, for example, by Edward Penny on Painting or Samuel Wale on perspective. They would all congregate for Reynolds’s annual Discourse, which was the time that the President was re-elected and elections were held for new members. Again, what one recognises is a strong community of competitive interest — older artists looking over the shoulders of younger ones and encouraging them by their criticism.
Of course, I would not advocate that we should go back to teaching drawing from the antique. But a system of teaching which produced in the space of a decade three such diverse artists as Thomas Lawrence, Constable and Turner is not, I think, to be despised.
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