Reynolds · 1768
Reynolds founds the Royal Academy
On the morning of the tenth of December 1768, at a small private audience in the King's Closet at Buckingham House (the precursor of Buckingham Palace), Joshua Reynolds, forty-five years old, the most successful London portrait painter of the previous decade, was presented to George III by Sir William Chambers (the king's architect) and a deputation of twenty-two London artists, with the draft Instrument of Foundation of the *Royal Academy of Arts in London*. The Instrument established the new academy under the patronage of the Crown, the first state-supported English visual-arts institution, with thirty-six founding members (the Royal Academicians), a teaching schools for young artists, an annual exhibition open to non-members, and the presidency to be elected by the Academicians. The king signed the Instrument the same morning. The Academicians elected Reynolds as the first President at the inaugural meeting at Lambe's Auction Room, Pall Mall, on the fourteenth of December 1768. Reynolds held the office for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He delivered the fifteen *Discourses* to the Royal Academy schools on the principles of art over the twenty years of his presidency, the foundational English-language treatise on the theory of painting.
It is twenty past ten on the morning of the tenth of December 1768, in the King's Closet at Buckingham House on the west side of Pall Mall in central London, in winter light through the south casement. He is forty-five years old. He is Joshua Reynolds, born at Plympton St Maurice, Devon, on the sixteenth of July 1723, son of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds the schoolmaster of the Plympton Grammar School and Theophila Potter, schooled at his father's school and then in the London studio of Thomas Hudson, in the twenty-fifth year of his independent practice, the portrait-painter of late-Georgian London with about four hundred sittings a year and a studio at 47 Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).
Sir William Chambers, the king's architect, fifty-four, is at his right elbow. The deputation of twenty-two London artists (the English-and-French-and-Italian-emigrant painters of the previous decade who have been meeting weekly at the Turk's Head tavern on Gerrard Street since the previous winter) is in the antechamber. The draft Instrument of Foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London is on the table, twenty-two pages of foolscap in the hand of Francis Newton the secretary of the deputation, with the thirty-six founding-members' names on the roster.
King George III, thirty, is at the writing-desk in the south of the closet. He has, in the past five minutes, read the Instrument through in detail.
He thinks: the English visual-arts establishment has been, for the previous century, behind the French Académie Royale and the Italian Accademia di San Luca. The reason is the absence of state patronage. The French Academy has the royal-school in Paris and the prix de Rome. The Italian academies have the papal-and-Medici patronage.
He thinks: George wants the institutional ground for the English art-establishment. George is twenty-eight and is the first English-born Hanoverian king. George wants the institutional culture of the country to come up to the French standard.
He thinks: the Royal Academy will, if it is established today, run on the self-government model of the thirty-six Academicians electing the president and the schools. The model is the Bologna model and the Florentine model. The English-Royal-Academy model will be the institutional template for the later imperial-and-colonial academies of the next century: Edinburgh, Dublin, Toronto, Sydney, Calcutta.
The king signs the Instrument of Foundation at twenty past ten. The deputation is called in. The first general meeting of the Royal Academy is held at Lambe's Auction Room, Pall Mall, on the fourteenth of December 1768. Reynolds is elected the first President by the unanimous vote of the thirty-six Academicians. The presidency is on the salary of £200 a year (about £30,000 in 2025 money). The first Royal Academy exhibition is held at the Pall Mall premises on the twenty-sixth of April 1769; the public attendance over the six-week run is about thirty thousand.
Reynolds delivered the fifteen Discourses on Art to the Royal Academy Schools at the annual prize-giving on the tenth of December (the anniversary of the foundation) of every other year between 1769 and 1790. The collected Discourses (published in book form 1797 by Edmond Malone) are the foundational English-language treatise on the theory of painting, taught at every English and Anglophone-American art school of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the Discourses were on the core curriculum of the Slade and the Royal College of Art until at least 1960; the American art-schools, from the Pennsylvania Academy of 1805 onward, took them as the template).
Reynolds held the presidency of the Royal Academy until his retirement in 1790 (he resigned on the dispute over the nomination of an Italian artist named Giuseppe Bonomi to the professorship of perspective). He died at 47 Leicester Fields on the twenty-third of February 1792, sixty-eight years old. He is buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, the first artist buried in the cathedral. His studio at 47 Leicester Fields was demolished in 1937; the site is now Empire Cinema, Leicester Square. The Royal Academy moved from Pall Mall to Somerset House in 1780, to the National Gallery building in 1837, and to Burlington House on Piccadilly (its present home) in 1868, where it remains.