In honour of the many Friends of the Royal Academy who have kindly looked at my blog today (I’ve had record numbers of visitors) I am doing a second post related to the history of the Summer Exhibition.   It’s a picture of the process of selection as painted by Charles West Cope in 1875.   It’s one of the stars of the exhibition of our collection currently on in Bendigo outside Melbourne, Australia (see previous blogs).   It tells one so much about the nature of the high Victorian RA.   The artist was named after Benjamin West (his sister was named after Turner) and he was Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy Schools.   He is in the background, bald and bearded.   The then President, Sir Francis Grant, leans back in his chair, whiskered and supercilious and wrapped in a rug.   In the front, Millais has taken off his top hat and put it on the floor in front of him.   My predecessor, Sir Frederick Eaton, is dutifully taking notes.   The whole scene exudes a sense of the authority that the Academy held in 1876, when the Academicians were all wealthy, selling their works to industrialist and nouveau riche collectors.

Ⓒ Royal Academy of Arts

This is the season when the annual Summer exhibition is hung.   Wandering round the galleries in the morning, members of the committee are busy with the difficult task of selection of pictures and sculpture for whichever room they are hanging, intent on doing the best for the Royal Academicians, their peers, for the open submission, and, not least, for the public.   Each year I am impressed by how deeply seriously they take it – how to make the best possible display, how to show as many works as is practical without overloading the rooms, how to balance works by known artists and unknown, how to grapple with the tricky individual works.   At 11, they are fortified by beef tea (reputedly, a mixture of sherry and bones).   By lunchtime the artists involved in the hanging need fortification.  They retreat to the General Assembly Room.   This scene of Academicians having lunch during  the hang was painted by Frederick Elwell (he’s standing up on the left) in 1938, lots of old men sitting round the table with their cigarettes and cigars.   Nowadays lunch is quicker and much less formal, self-service and tough beef.   It concentrates on the problems of the hang, but also includes a bit of RA gossip, which is why I always like this time of year.

The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee, Frederick William Elwell. © The Royal Academy of Arts

My second choice of painting from the RA’s own collection is going to be the picture of Humphrey Brooke, one of my predecessors as Secretary.   He died in 1988, but his widow, Nathalie, is still very much alive and comes to events.   He came from a grand Yorkshire family, was a so-called Monuments Man during the second world war, worked in Austria after the war where he met Nathalie Benckendorff, was deputy director of the Tate, and became Secretary of the RA in 1952.   He suffered from manic depression and believed it could only be cured by sex and smoking.  His portrait by Olwyn Bowey shows the latter, a man of the establishment, comfortably enjoying a fag.

Humphrey Brooke (1914–1988)
by Olwyn Bowey. (c) The Royal Academy of Arts