"Sr Joshua and His Gang": William Blake and the Royal Academy

Abstract

To judge from Blake's references to Royal Academy around 1808 or 1809, it was a nest of both fools and villains with its character shaped by greatest knave of all, its first president, a man Hired by Satans for Depression of Art. Three or four earlier and quite neutral references hardly correct impression left by these remarks that Blake saw Academy as hostile to development of true art and especially antagonistic to his own. 1 It is not surprising, then, that most scholars follow Blake's lead in decrying Academy's influence while at same time minimizing its importance in shaping his career. But Blake's relationship with Academy was more complex and more interesting than this, and more continuous than is generally admitted. To trace unfolding of his deeply ambivalent attitude may throw some new light on his own aspirations and his achievement within context of British art during his lifetime. We must start by recalling situation at time of Blake's birth, at end of a long period when, according to Horace Walpole, the arts were sunk to their lowest ebb in Britain.2 Under first two Georges, court was notoriously indifferent to painting, while church was antipathetic. Private patrons collected Old Masters and ignored contemporary talent; foreign artists were recruited to decorate walls and ceilings of great country and city houses with vast mythological scenes while English painters were left mainly to portray faces, clothes, dogs, and horses of their owners. Portraiture was regarded as an exercise of mere mechanick skill; young Joshua Reynolds, fresh from three years' study on Continent, compared English portraits to so many