British Art History and the Royal Academy

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the exhibition culture of the Georgian period. This has been prompted in no small measure by David Solkin's groundbreaking Art on the Line show at the Courtauld Institute Galleries in the autumn and winter of 2001–2002, which so memorably recreated the spectacle of a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Royal Academy hang. The impact of this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue on scholarship of British art of the period has been profound. Studies of the art of the Georgian era are now attentive to the politics of display in a manner that has made the familiar appear anew.1 This is apparent in synoptic studies like Peter de Bolla's The Education of the Eye, where the advent of public exhibitions is seen as instrumental in shaping modern visuality.2 But it can also be observed in detailed case studies of individual shows by scholars like Mark Hallett and Eleanor Hughes, or Rosie Dias's recent mapping of London exhibition venues in the closing years of the eighteenth century.3 The importance of Art on the Line to the direction of studies in the period is also evident in the institutional histories under consideration here, Holger Hoock's account of the Royal Academy under the Hanoverians, The King's Artists, and Matthew Hargraves' history of the rival Society of Artists of Great Britain, Candidates for Fame. Both scholars privilege the role of the exhibition in narrating the intertwined histories of these bodies, making frequent citation of the essays to be found in the Art on the Line catalogue. They attend closely to individual artists' exhibiting strategies and contemporary press responses. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent writing on British art in the reign of George III is the way it has begun to draw on this review material. This is an archive that has been surprisingly neglected but has now been opened up by invaluable collections of such material, not least that held in the library of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. Consideration of these textual sources has placed ever-greater emphasis on the reception of artworks, and how this was so often informed by the cut-throat competition of the metropolitan scene. Contentions over the proper form contemporary British art might take are central to the concerns of much art writing of the period, so are also inevitably of primary interest to Hoock and Hargraves. For these writers, this was a series of conflicts in which the Academy eventually and somewhat inevitably won out.