Books: The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London

Charles Saumarez Smith’s book on the origins, birth and infancy of the Royal Academy (RA) is a sharply focused history of the institution and is as equally enjoyable as James Fenton’s School Of Genius, which traces the story of the RA from its foundation in 1768 to the beginning of the 21st century.

Saumarez Smith has been the secretary and chief executive of the RA since 2007 and as a result he brings to the narration his personal experience of a body that, love it or loathe it, has been a dominant force at the centre of British art for almost 250 years. A glance at the list of academicians who have followed in the footsteps of the first 36 makes that only too clear.

Yet this has not always been a happy band of artists. Like any lively institution, the academy has been riven with argument and rows; some petty squabbling, others more serious such as Alfred Munnings’ drunken attack on modern art in 1949 or the 1935 failure to support Jacob Epstein against accusations of obscenity over sculptures designed for the facade of a building in the Strand.

The Company of Artists makes it clear that debate ran in the academy’s blood from the start.

The opening sentence of the prologue sets the scene and the book’s style: “Some time in the cold, damp windy afternoon of Monday 28 November 1768, four figures arrived at the gateway of St James’s Place to see King George III. The monarch was engaged for most of the afternoon in a ceremony in which… he was pleased to invest the Duke of Roxburghe with the Ensigns of the... Order of the Thistle.”

It’s a good example of the way in which Saumarez Smith balances the detailed research, with which the book abounds, with writing using a pleasantly light touch.

As always in books of this kind, it’s the people who illuminate the pages and Saumarez Smith is a master of the quick sketch portrait. As a result the characters in this relatively short episode in the academy’s history are given the breath of life.

When the artist Benjamin West is called “slightly cocky”, it seemed that for the moment at least this was all you probably needed to know about the seemingly somewhat pushy American who was to serve two long stints as president of the academy, the only person to do so in its long history.

When Richard Wilson, another founder member of the RA, is described as “at this stage [when] his career [was] turning to drink”, the mental image is immediate.

And there is the revelation of another side of Reynolds’s character – the great portraitist who, “ while so diligent during the day… liked nothing better than a boozy dinner with friends”, often losing money at the pharo table before wending his way home.

The early academicians were no slouches when it came to food and drink and if they were alone in their studios during the day, they made up for their diurnal isolation by gathering in coffee houses and taverns to eat and to drink, often in copious quantities, but above all to debate art.

In his analysis of the early aims of the academy, Saumarez Smith puts this “purely social function” at the top of his list and he gives two parallels in history – 15th-century Florence and New York in the 1950s. This social bond may help to explain how the motley crew who were the founders of the RA achieved so much in such a short time.

These first early months were to set the tone for much of what was to come. Christopher Le Brun, the current president of the RA, recognises from Saumarez Smith’s telling of the organisation’s early history, the academy as it still is today.

Le Brun writes: “The big egos. How to teach art. The status of drawing. Whether or not art stems from genius, ambition or sheer hard work. Everything which is still important and good about the Royal Academy was discussed and debated in those first few weeks.”

Saumarez Smith concludes that many of the academy’s present characteristics remain recognisably the 18th century. “It can be brutal,” he concludes. “But at least its brutality is sanctioned by the traditions and values of the Enlightenment.”

Timothy Mason is a museum Consultant