Although I was still feeling rather groggy with a summer cold, I hauled myself out of bed to witness the first visitors arrive in Burlington Gardens.   I wanted to see and experience what it felt like to ordinary visitors, not just our Friends who have been exploring it gingerly over the last few days.

I discovered our Head of Collections dusting down the skeletons:-

And was able to photograph him with the first real visitors:-

The courtyard looks festive in the morning sun:-

And I had a cappuccino in the Poster Bar:-

It’s a day of celebration.

In the interests of the historical record, I am posting a piece I wrote for the RA’s in-house magazine about the experience of watching visitors enjoy the new building in the first few days:-

I’ve been asked to record my reactions to the new building.  It happens that the request has arrived just as I have sat down to a cappucino in the Casson Room (buns are either off the menu or have all been eaten) after walking round to get a feel for our visitors’ response.

​I enjoyed going round, not least because appearing on ‘The Private Life of the Royal Academy’ means that many more Friends recognise me and come up​ and chat, including Sandy Wilson’s first wife.  I see them doing a double take and then ask a question to check that I’m real.

I was particularly pleased to see that the Dorfman Senate Room was packed in the middle of the afternoon even though you can only get beer, not tea.  The space is humanised, literally as well as metaphorically, by being used.

I’m delighted by the trio of commercial spaces on the ground floor, which strike just the right balance between being clearly commercial, but also appropriate to the atmosphere of the building – the Poster Bar which has been designed to be like the bar of an Eastern European railway station, the Personal Shopping space with its plan chest, and the Newsstand with the latest art magazines (and, by the way, buy a card, write it, and have it posted for you – a lovely idea):-

One of the things that many people have remarked on is the centrality of the Schools and the way that this changes people’s attitude to the Academy.  Of course, as the President says, this was the whole point of the scheme.  But the theory can be different to the practice.  I had not anticipated how key it is to the experience, mixing new art with old, the anarchic with the respectable, giving a frisson as one travels through the vaults into the Weston studio.  It puts practice at the heart of the Academy in a wonderful way.

Another thing that has given me incredible pleasure is seeing staff sitting out in the sun eating sandwiches under the pleached trees of the Lovelace Courtyard.

After many years of staring at ground plans and CGIs, the experience is suddenly real, like a cartoon which has sprung into life.

But the real test will be 10 o’clock on Saturday when the first visitors walk in.

I have been reading the booklet, the return of the past: Conversations on Postmodernism, which the Soane Museum has produced to accompany its exhibition.   It consists of interviews with the key protagonists and makes clear that while we tend now to think of it as merely a colourful style of historical pastiche, it had its origins in a widespread disillusionment in the early 1970s with the whole apparatus of the welfare state, local authority control of housing, statism and the standardisation which was a characteristic of modernism.   Piers Gough saw himself as a pop architect wanting people to like and enjoy what he produced, including the taxi drivers who bought flats in Cascades.   Jeremy Dixon toured the country talking to branches of the RIBA and was embarrassed by what his profession had inflicted on British cities.   I had a flashback to what it was actually like in 1974 with hyperinflation, the beginnings of IRA bombings, two general elections, and the three-day week.   It is hardly surprising that architects looked for new solutions to reconnect architecture to its public.

It’s time now to catch up on all the things I didn’t have time to do in the week.   One of them is to identify the sitters in Henry Singleton’s big painting of The Royal Academicians in General Assemby which now has pride of place in our new Collections Gallery.   So far as I can find, this can only be done by reference to a published Key to the Royal Academicians, which was produced by Charles Bestland to accompany the original engraving (there is no key provided in the Gallery, nor in the recently published book about our History and Collections).

Benjamin West is easy, sitting in pride of place on the President’s Chair in a cocked hat, painted in 1795 three years after he had become President and after turning down a knighthood in the expectation that he would be made a life peer.   The figure immediately to his right is Sir Francis Bourgeois, described in the key as ‘Painter to His Majesty and to the Kg of Poland’:-

On the left are three figures (6,8 and 10 in the key) – Sir William Beechey, Portrait Painter to His Majesty;  Francis Wheatley;  and Joseph Wilton, now aged 73 and Keeper of the Schools, wearing spectacles:-

Standing proudly underneath Laocoön is Benjamin West’s fellow countryman, John Singleton Copley

And next door to Copley, Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, and John Opie, the Cornish painter:-

We had a staff party last night to celebrate the completion of Burlington Gardens in which a faintly familiar figure appeared on the screen:-

I have just been listening to the podcast produced by the Art Newspaper (ow.ly/Vk0w30k55XY) which consists of ten minutes of me (you can skip that) and then a long and fascinating description by David Chipperfield of his methodology at the RA – his focus on how spaces are used, what he calls his diagnostic approach, his sensitivity and interest, for example, in how works of art are stored, his sense of the project being a jigsaw of interrelated parts which needed ordering and clarification – which is precisely what he has done. He is asked how far it helped or hindered him that there were so many architect RAs involved and I suddenly realised how important it had been to him that every aspect of his proposals was being intensively inspected by his peers, including Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, who chaired the Client Committee (and who, I think, suggested putting the lavatories on the ground floor, not the basement), Chris Wilkinson, who took over the Client Committee, and Spencer de Grey, who was responsible with Norman Foster for the Sackler Galleries: tough judges of every aspect of what was proposed.

I don’t normally write letters to the Times, but was encouraged to yesterday.   This is the text (I don’t think it has been edited):-

In the week that the Royal Academy opens a new building dedicated to Britain’s achievements in the arts, I write in support of Alice Thomson’s article about the decline in all forms of art teaching in Schools.   This is an issue about which all Royal Academicians are united in deploring:  the loss of visual skills;  the importance of creativity;  the role of the imagination;  and the ways in which the arts have been a vehicle for social mobility.   The government is going in the wrong direction.

I called in at the Postmodernism exhibition:  nice, if small.   Jim Stirling’s No. 1 Poultry, beautifully illustrated in drawings which show it artfully in the context of its surroundings;  Rex Wilkinson of CZWG’s Cascades, with a disgracefully nasty review by Stephen Gardiner in the Observer which demonstrates the depth of prejudice at the time against any form of architecture which might give pleasure to the viewer or play games with formal language;  Terry Farrell’s MI6 Building;  John Outram’s Wadhurst Park which was my first introduction to the genre;  and then, unexpectedly, Jeremy Dixon’s original designs for the Royal Opera House, which are much less flamboyant examples of the style, but share an interest in classicism and contextualism, trying to avoid the destruction of Covent Garden as a neighbourhood, a quality for which it is inadequately appreciated.

A cancelled lecture meant that I was able to call in at the exhibition in the British Museum devoted to a triumvirate of friends in Greece in the post-war period – John Craxton, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Niko Ghika.   It reminded me of the fact that the NPG commissioned John Craxton to paint Leigh Fermor, based on a knowledge of their friendship and the fact that Craxton had done the dustjackets for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards.   It never happened.   By then, it was perhaps too nostalgic an exercise and Craxton had become more interested in his life in Crete than in answering the demands of a formal commission.   But it’s sad nonetheless and means that Leigh Fermor is recorded in the NPG only by photographs (Craxton by an early Self-portrait because Freud claimed that his portrait of him was not of him).