We had dinner last night in the private room at Clarke’s where the prints by Lucian Freud hang.   We were greeted at the door by someone who seemed vaguely familiar.   It was Alice Waters over from Berkeley for a few days with a pastry chef from Switzerland to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Clarke’s.   It was quite an event with all the chefs, including Sally, lined up on the street for a team photograph.   Romilly was able to tell her that we had once driven from Chicago for dinner at Chez Panisse.

Another unsung hero of the RA’s history is the neoclassical sculptor, John Gibson.   Born near Conway in north Wales, apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Liverpool, he was encouraged to turn to sculpture by Samuel Franceys and the collector, William Roscoe.   He exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1810 and attended its lectures in anatomy.   In 1817, he gravitated to London and to the circle of neoclassicists round Flaxman.   The next step was Rome, where he studied under Canova, helped found the British Academy of Arts in Rome with Charles Eastlake and Joseph Severn, and received innumerable commissions from British aristocrats on the grand tour.   He stayed in Rome for the rest of his life, grew rich and famous, was made a member of eleven academies and left his entire estate to the Royal Academy to allow them to build an extra storey on the top of Burlington House (where the Sackler Gallery now is) to show his work.

Portrait of John Gibson, R.A. ca. 1850. by Sir Edwin Landseer R.A. Ⓒ Royal Academy of Arts

In talking about the Summer Exhibition last night, I realised how much of its quality and character derives from the scale and variety of the great exhibition galleries which were added to the back of Burlington House by Sydney Smirke, opening in 1868.   I had always thought, quite erroneously, that he was the son of Robert Smirke, the architect of the British Museum.   Wrong.   He was the son of Robert Smirke RA, an early student of the Royal Academy Schools, who had eight children, including Robert and Sydney (and Sir Edward, an archaeologist).   Sydney was trained in the office of his older brother and took over as project architect at the British Museum after his brother’s retirement in 1846, so was responsible for the construction, if not the design, of the round reading-room.   But he also undertook a host of other projects, including churches in Lancashire, large country houses and three St. James’s clubs – the Oxford and Cambridge (with Robert), the Conservative Club (with Basevi), and the Carlton (on his own).   A major, and rather underestimated, classical architect.

Sydney Smirke RA, Design for Gallery III, Burlington House, Piccadilly, Westminster, London: perspective of gallery looking east, c.1866-67.

I was asked to give the Annual Arts Lecture at Hurlingham last night and was encouraged to talk about the Summer Exhibition, which I have never done before.   I kept on getting in a muddle between ‘we’ and ‘they’, because it is we, the Royal Academy, who put it on and they, the Royal Academicians, who arrange, oversee and orchestrate it.   But I hope I managed to convey something of a) its extraordinarily long history b) the continuity in its system of organisation and ethos and b) the curious tension which has existed forever between its extreme democracy, in that anyone can enter and does, and its extreme selectivity, in that it has always been dominated not just in its process but also in what it shows by the relatively small number of RAs.