In 1753 some artists meeting at the Turk’s Head, Gerrard Street, Soho, tried ineffectually to organise an academy; but in 1765 they obtained a charter, and appointed Mr. Lambert president.
In 1760 their first exhibition of pictures was held in the rooms of the Society of Arts, and in 1761 there were two exhibitions, one at Spring Gardens: for the latter Hogarth illustrated a catalogue, with a compliment to the young king and a caricature of rich connoisseurs.
In 1768 eight of the directors of the Spring Gardens Society, indignant at Mr. Kirby being made president of the society in the place of Mr. Hayman, resigned; and, co-operating with sixteen others who had been ejected, secretly founded a new society. Wilton, Chambers, West, Cotes, and Moser, were the leaders in this scheme, and Reynolds soon joined them, tempted, it is supposed, by a promise of knighthood.
West was the chief mover in this intrigue. The Archbishop of York, who had tried to raise £3000 to enable the American artist to abandon portrait-painting, had gained the royal ear, and West was painting the “Departure of Regulus” for the king, who was even persuaded and flattered into drawing up several of the laws of the new society with his own hand.[126] The king, in the meantime, with unworthy dissimulation, affected outwardly a complete neutrality between the two camps, presented the Spring Gardens Society with £100, and even attended their exhibition.
The king’s patronage of the new society was disclosed to honest Mr. Kirby (father of Mrs. Trimmer, and the artist who had taught the king perspective) in a very malicious and mortifying manner, and the story was related to Mr. Galt by West, with a quiet, cold spite, peculiarly his own. Mr. Kirby came to the palace just as West was submitting his sketch for “Regulus” to the king. West was a true courtier, and knew well how to make a patron suggest his own subject. Kirby praised the picture, and hoped Mr. West intended to exhibit it. The Quaker slily replied that that depended on his majesty’s pleasure. The king, like a true confederate, immediately said, “Assuredly I shall be happy to let the work be shown to the public.” “Then, Mr. West,” said the perhaps too arrogant president, “you will send it to my exhibition?” “No!” said the king, and the words must have been thunderbolts to poor Kirby; “it must go to my exhibition.”[127] “Poor Kirby,” says West, “only two nights before, had declared that the design of forming such an institution was not contemplated. His colour forsook him—his countenance became yellow with mortification—he bowed with profound humility, and instantly retired, nor did he long survive the shock!”
Mr. West is wrong, however, in the last statement, for his rival did not die till 1774. Mr. Kirby, a most estimable man, was originally a house-painter at Ipswich. He became acquainted with Gainsborough, was introduced by Lord Bute to the king, and wrote and edited some valuable works on perspective, to one of which Hogarth contributed an inimitable frontispiece.
Sir Robert Strange says that much of this intrigue was carried out by Mr. Dalton,[128] a print seller in Pall Mall, and the king’s librarian, in whose rooms the exhibition was held in 1767 and 1768.
Thus an American Quaker, a Swiss, and a Swede—(a gold-chaser, a coach-painter, an architect, and a third-rate painter, West)—ignobly established the Royal Academy. Many eminent men refused to join the new society. Allan Ramsay, Hudson, Scott the marine-painter, and Romney were opposed to it. Engravers (much to the disgrace of the Academy) were excluded; and worst of all, one of the new laws forbade any artist to be eligible to academic honours who did not exhibit his works in the Academy’s rooms: thus depriving for ever every English artist of the right to earn money by exhibiting his own works.[129]
The proportion of foreigners in the Academy was very large. The two ladies who became members (Angelica Kauffmann and Mrs. Moser) were both Swiss.[130]
The other unlucky society, deprived of its share of the St. Martin’s Lane casts, etc., and shut out from the Academy, furnished a studio over the Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane, struggled on till 1807, and then ceased to exist.[131]