Reynolds founds the Royal Academy

Some institutions are founded by decree and some by petition, but the most durable are founded by a portrait painter who has spent twenty years studying how to make a sitter sit still. The English had wanted an academy for a century. The French had one, the Italians several, the Dutch their guilds; the English had taverns and rivalries and the occasional subscription room that collapsed within the decade. What was needed was not a manifesto but a man patient enough to draft a constitution as carefully as he drafted a hand, and prosperous enough to be feared by no one. On a winter morning in 1768, in a closet off Pall Mall, such a man laid twenty-two pages of foolscap on a writing-desk and waited for a young king to lift his pen.

THE SITTER AND THE STUDIO

Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton St Maurice in Devon on the sixteenth of July 1723, the son of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, schoolmaster of the grammar school, and Theophila Potter. He learned drawing from his father's copy of Jonathan Richardson's Theory of Painting before he learned anatomy from anything else, and the book persuaded him early that the painter was a thinker before he was a tradesman. He served his apprenticeship in the London studio of Thomas Hudson, sailed to Italy in 1749 with Commodore Keppel, spent two winters copying in Rome until the cold of the Vatican stanze gave him the deafness he would carry for life, and returned to London in 1752 to set up at Great Newport Street and then, from 1760, at 47 Leicester Fields. By 1768 he sat about four hundred sitters a year. His pocket-book recorded the dukes and the actresses in the same neat column. He had Samuel Johnson for company at dinner and Edmund Burke for company in argument and Oliver Goldsmith for company in everything else; the Literary Club met at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, and the painters had begun, that same winter, to meet in the room above it.

The painters' grievance was older than any of them. The Society of Artists had quarrelled itself into halves; the Incorporated Society had a charter and no school; the dilettanti had patronage and no discipline. What England lacked, and France had possessed since 1648, was an institution with the Crown's name on the door and a teaching school inside it. A deputation had been forming through the autumn of 1768. Sir William Chambers, the king's architect, knew the king's ear; Reynolds knew the painters. Between them they had drafted the Instrument of Foundation, twenty-two pages in the hand of Francis Newton, with the names of thirty-six founding members already entered on the roster.

THE KING'S CLOSET

The tenth of December 1768 came in cold, the Thames running grey under London Bridge and the south casement of the King's Closet at Buckingham House admitting that thin winter light by which English painters had learned to flatter without lying. At twenty past ten Reynolds stood at the writing-desk with Chambers at his right elbow. The deputation of twenty-two London artists waited in the antechamber: the Italians Cipriani and Bartolozzi, the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, the Frenchman Moser, the Englishmen West and Wilson and Sandby and the rest, the émigré and native talent of a decade gathered into a single room. George the Third was thirty years old, the first English-born Hanoverian, a king who had said at his accession that he gloried in the name of Britain. He had the Instrument on the desk in front of him and was reading it through.

Reynolds had been a painter long enough to know what a face does when it is about to consent. He watched the king's hand more than the king's eye. The fingers had not yet moved towards the standish. Through the casement the bells of St James's struck the quarter.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE PEN

A constitution is a portrait of a future society, and a portrait is at heart a question of what to leave out. Reynolds had cut from the draft what he had thought, even a week earlier, was indispensable. He had cut the language that would have made the presidency hereditary in practice by tying it to seniority. He had cut the clause that would have given the Crown the nomination of the schools' professors. He had left in the article that the thirty-six Academicians should themselves elect their president, and elect him afresh each year; he had left in the schools, free of charge, open to any youth who could draw from the cast well enough to be admitted; he had left in the annual exhibition, open to non-members, the door by which every provincial drawing-master's son might walk into the room. The Academy he had drafted was a self-governing republic of artists under the protection of a Crown that would pay its deficits and keep its hands off its votes. He knew, standing there, that a younger king might want a tighter rein, and that an older painter might have wanted one too. He had chosen the looser. The thought that pressed on him was not of Paris or of Rome but of Plympton: that the schoolmaster's son who had walked up the hill to the grammar school every morning was, by this paper, opening a door in London that any other schoolmaster's son might walk through. Discipline through emulation, said Richardson's book; the art is not to be learned by the practice of mere mechanical operations, said his own first Discourse, drafted in his head already against the day he would deliver it. The king turned the last page. The pen was still on the standish. Reynolds did not breathe. The pen was taken up. The signature was written. It was twenty past ten.

THE FOUNDING

The deputation was called in from the antechamber. Chambers presented the Academicians by name, and the king received them as a body. They withdrew before eleven. On the fourteenth of December, four days later, the thirty-six met at Lambe's Auction Room in Pall Mall for the first general assembly of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Reynolds was elected the first President by the unanimous vote of the Academicians. The salary attached to the office was two hundred pounds a year. The first exhibition opened at the Pall Mall premises on the twenty-sixth of April 1769; about thirty thousand visitors passed through it over the six weeks of its run, paying a shilling at the door, and a public for English painting was made in those six weeks that had not existed in April.

THE DISCOURSES

On the tenth of December 1769, the anniversary of the foundation, Reynolds rose at the annual prize-giving and delivered the first of what would become fifteen Discourses on Art. He went on delivering them, every other year, until 1790. They were spoken to the students of the schools, to the silversmiths' boys and the engravers' apprentices who had drawn their way past the cast-room door, and they took as their first principle that the painter was a thinker. The art is not to be learned by the practice of mere mechanical operations. He told them to study the great masters not to copy them but to be free of them; he told them that genius was the long habit of attention; he told them that the grand style was a discipline of generalisation, not a flight from the particular. Edmund Malone collected them in book form in 1797. They were taught at the Slade and the Royal College of Art into the second half of the twentieth century, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of 1805 and every American art-school that followed it, and at Edinburgh and Dublin and Toronto and Sydney and Calcutta as the imperial century built its academies on the English template.

THE LEICESTER FIELDS DOOR

Reynolds held the presidency for twenty-three years. He resigned, briefly, in 1790 over the nomination of Giuseppe Bonomi to the professorship of perspective, and was prevailed upon to resume. He went blind in his left eye in July 1789 while painting and laid down the brush. He died at 47 Leicester Fields on the twenty-third of February 1792, sixty-eight years old, and was carried through London to St Paul's Cathedral on the third of March, the first artist buried in the crypt, his pall borne by three dukes, two marquesses, three earls and a lord. Burke wrote the eulogy: he had been, Burke said, the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. The Academy moved from Pall Mall to Somerset House in 1780, to the new National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square in 1837, and to Burlington House on Piccadilly in 1868, where it remains. The studio at 47 Leicester Fields was demolished in 1937; the site is the cinema on the north side of Leicester Square.

Some institutions outlast their founders by becoming invisible, the scaffolding so absorbed into the building that the building seems always to have stood. Two and a half centuries on, a girl from a provincial town walks up the courtyard of Burlington House on a Saturday morning, pays at the door of the Summer Exhibition, and does not need to know the name Reynolds to know that the door is open to her. That is the kind of monument a portrait painter builds: not a statue of himself, but a room any stranger can enter. In the crypt of St Paul's, under a plain slab, the schoolmaster's son from Plympton lies near Wren and Nelson, and above him, every June, the walls of Burlington House go up again with the work of strangers.