The Royal Academy at Somerset House - Books about Antiques

Magazine Antiques, August, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

The English Royal Academy of Arts held its annual exhibition in rented premises on Pall Mall in London from its founding in 1768 until 1780, when it moved to the newly rebuilt Somerset House on the Strand. There it remained until it moved again in 1836.

Founded to create a native school of art, the academy was modeled on the French Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture. As formulated in Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses (1769-1790), the ideal was an art that transcended the particular in favor of the universal expression of beauty and moral truth. In short, English high art was to resemble its counterpart on the Continent.

The first factor mitigating the achievement of this lofty aim was the makeup of Somerset House itself, which was divided into a number of exhibition rooms, of which the Great Room was the most sought after. There an inviolable molding encircled the room at the height of eight feet and no pictures were allowed to overlap it. The pictures above the line hung out from the wall at an angle of seventeen degrees because the walls gradually curved inward to form the cove ceiling. Below the line paintings were hung all the way to the floor. During the annual exhibition, not an inch of wall was visible, in keeping with the fashion of the time. The integrity of the line was first tested by Thomas Gainsborough in 1784 when he withdrew all eighteen submissions upon being informed that a large portrait of his would not be hung over the line as he had insisted. Although an academician, Gainsborough refused to show his paintings in the academy's exhibitions ever again.

One of the canniest exhibitors was Joseph Mallord William Turner who brought only the vaguest sketches to what were known as the varnishing days. At this point everyone knew their position and could use those four days to touch up and varnish their canvases. During the varnishing days Turner would in effect paint his pictures so as to maximize their effect vis-a-vis his neighbors. In 1832 a relatively monochromatic sea scene by Turner was placed next to John Constable's large and colorful Opening of Waterloo Bridge. On one of the varnishing days Turner placed a dab of vermilion as big as a shilling in the sea on his painting. Then, at the last minute he shaped the blob into a perfectly plausible buoy. In this way he had his revenge on Constable, who, as a member of the hanging committee in 1831, had commandeered Turner's assigned position for one of his own paintings.

Turner's was by no means the only example academicians' pettiness. As the editor of this series of essays, David H. Solkin, writes: "Ostensibly designed as a showcase for the laudable achievements of the British School, and as an engine for the edification and improvement of society at large, the exhibitions were--all denials to the contrary--a doubly commercial enterprise, operating as both a highly profitable spectacle and a marketplace for expensive luxury goods., ..the pretensions of artists to disinterested liberality came into open conflict time and again with the fiercely competitive nature of their trade....the character of the audience was no less unstable: both an elevated public and a vulgar crowd, and united only by an insatiable taste for novelty, it fluctuated constantly between the classical and the grotesque."

The many aspects of the academy's residence in Somerset House, noble and ignoble, are the subjects of Art on the Line, which earlier this year complemented a major exhibition at the Courtauld Institute Gallery, one of the current residents of the building.