The summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its overstuffed galleries and motley collection of overblown portraits, twee still lifes and garish landscapes has become an event where you go to be seen rather than to see; it’s less about the art than the experience. But the first-ever public show of paintings, sculpture, architectural drawings in London, which opened on 21 April 1760, was a truly artistic sensation. For the first time, it was possible for anyone to see the best of British paintings and sculpture, for the price of a modest entrance fee. Until then, viewing great masters had been strictly limited to those who could afford to travel abroad to the galleries of Florence, Rome, Paris, or who had rich friends with a private collection.
You might ask why it took so long for British painters to get together to promote their work. But artists, like writers, being highly competitive and awfully narcissistic, are not naturally co-operative. There’s lots of quarrelling, rows and petty disputes in Charles Saumarez Smith’s account of how the fledgling Society of Artists, which organised that first exhibition, grew into the much grander and more seriously organised Royal Academy, with its regal imprimatur and an agenda that included not just organising an annual show but also establishing a ‘well regulated School or Academy of Design’.
The Society had begun to disintegrate almost before its first exhibition, riven by feuds about hanging (pictures, not people). Why has your painting been hung in a better position than mine? What do I have to do to ensure my picture is included? Sub-groups grew out of sub-groups, rather like a church in crisis, until things got so bad the Attorney General was consulted. Resolutions and resignations followed in bewildering succession until finally the King, George III, allowed himself to be named as Patron and Protector to the new Academy and the members began to behave much better, quelled into quiescence by the lure of a royal commission.
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