Today’s the day when buying begins at the Summer Exhibition Preview party.   Everyone is going round clutching their little red books and checking out the prices.   I am doing it myself.   There’s a nice Michael Craig Martin print of an iPhone.   Only £960.   I really like the Ackroyd and Harvey photograph of their grass portrait (they work in grass).   It’s £5,000.   Too much for me.   Frank Bowling has got some great work in the exhibition, but it’s way beyond my means.   I hope someone will buy the Sean Scully, the price of which is on application.   There’s a really good set of prints by Stephen Chambers narrating the The Life and Loves of Casanova.   £6,000.   Part of the point of the exhibition is that there’s something for everyone.

The references in the annual dinner speech to Tom Monnington have pricked my interest in him.   He was President of the Royal Academy from 1966 to his death in 1976.   The revival of the Academy’s fortunes is normally attributed to Hugh Casson, but I suspect Monnington was important as well.   He had turned himself from being a painter of dry mural paintings as in the Allegory in the Tate (see his A Director Announcing Bank Rate in the Bank of England’s collection) and of racy realism in the war into an abstract artist after the war.   One thing which gives an indication of the style of his Presidency is that in 1972 he asked Bryan Kneale, then a new RA, to put together an exhibition of his generation of sculptors, including Tony Caro and Phillip King, and allowed him to paint the walls white and block out the doors.   I attach a picture of the selection committee for for Summer Exhibition in 1967 (note the pipe):

The annual dinner is the highlight of the RA’s year, an opportunity to celebrate the annual exhibition, for the RAs and the art world more generally to sport their plumage.   This year the speaker was Mervyn King, who is not only a former Governor of the Bank of England, but also a former Trustee of the National Gallery.   He spoke of the democracy of the annual exhibition in encouraging new collectors into the field and of the work of Tom Monnington in reviving the fortunes of the RA, as well as painting murals for the Bank of England.   The most moving fact of the evening was that El Anatsui, a new Honorary RA, had come over especially from Nigeria for the evening.

Today was non-members varnishing day, when those who have entered the Summer Exhibition come to see where their works have been hung.   It begins with a church service when we stop the traffic, process down Piccadilly led by a steel band, and attend a church service in St. James’s.   It must be one of the more secular occasions of the church year, conducted with vim by Lucy Winkett.   Then everyone goes back to the RA to eat strawberries, judge the hang, and hear who has won the prizes.

I went to the prizegiving for the Wolfson Prize for History tonight, which I have been going to nearly every year for the last twenty.   I like to go in order to find out what historians have been writing, at least the good ones;  and as a mark of respect to Leonard Wolfson, who was an extraordinarily knowledgeable and enthusiastic reader of twentieth-century history.   I once walked him round the twentieth-century gallery of the National Portrait Gallery.   He knew gigantically much more about every single sitter, particularly the politicians and generals, than I did.  I enjoy the dryness of the occasion, the presumption that no-one in London ever bothers to read a book.   This year the prize went to two books, The Red Fortress by Catherine Merridale, about the Kremlin, and a book about the archaeology of the Mediterranean, The Making of the Mediterranean Sea by Cyprian Broodbank.

I was asked to give a speech at the Fine Art Society to mark the foundation of the Whistler Society.   The reason I was asked was because he was never made an RA.   Why ?  He himself was keen.   He started exhibiting his engravings in the annual exhibition in 1859.   This was how his work came to public notice.   In 1864, he exhibited four works – The Scarf, Old Battersea Bridge, The Golden Screen and The little White Girl.   He was sufficiently confident of his abilities to put himself forward as a candidate.   But when, on 8 May 1866, six elections were held, Whistler received not a single vote.   Why ?  Too cocky ?  Too American ?  Wrong style of painting ?  He wrote to complain.   His biographer says that ‘to the day of his death he would have accepted membership’.