The Academy, with all its tyranny and injustice, has still been useful to English art in perpetuating annual exhibitions which attract purchasers. But what did more good to English art than twenty academies was the king’s patronage of West, the spread of engraving, and the rise of middle-class purchasers, who rendered it no longer necessary for artists to depend on the caprice and folly of rich aristocratic patrons.
One word more about the art oligarchy. The first officers of the new society were—Reynolds, president; Moser, keeper; Newton, secretary; Penny, professor of painting; Sandby, professor of architecture; Wale, professor of perspective; W. Hunter, professor of anatomy; Chambers, treasurer; and Wilson, librarian. Goldsmith was chosen professor of history at a later period.
The catalogue of the first exhibition of the Royal Academy contains the names of only one hundred and thirty pictures: Hayman exhibited scenes from Don Quixote; Rooker some Liverpool views; Reynolds some allegorised portraits; Miss Kauffmann some of her tame Homeric figures; West his “Regulus” (that killed Kirby), and a Venus and Adonis; Zuccarelli two landscapes.
In 1838, the first year after the opening of the National Gallery, 1382 works of art, including busts and architectural designs, were exhibited. Among the pictures then shown were—Stanfield’s “Chasse Marée off the Gulf-stream Light,” “The Privy Council,” by Wilkie; portraits of men and dogs, by Landseer; “The Pifferari,” “Phryne,” and “Banishment of Ovid,” by Turner; “A Bacchante,” by Etty; “Gaston de Foix,” by Eastlake; Allan’s “Slave Market,” Leslie’s “Dinner Scene from the Merry Wives of Windsor;” “A View on the Rhine,” by Callcott; Shee’s portrait of Sir Francis Burdett; portraits by Pickersgill; Maclise’s “Christmas in the Olden Time,” and “Olivia and Sophia fitting out Moses for the Fair;” “The Massacre of the Innocents,” by Hilton; and a picture by Uwins.[132]
Angelica Kauffmann and Biaggio Rebecca helped to decorate the Academy’s old council-chamber at Somerset House. The paintings still exist. Rebecca was an eccentric, conceited Italian artist, who decorated several rooms at Windsor, and offended the worthy precise old king by his practical jokes. On one occasion, knowing he would meet the king on his way to Windsor with West, he stuck a paper star on his coat. The next time West came, the king was curious to know who the foreign nobleman was he had seen—“Person of distinction, eh? eh?”—and was doubtless vexed at the joke.
Rebecca’s favourite trick was to draw a half-crown on paper, and place it on the floor of one of the ante-rooms at Windsor, laughing immoderately at the eagerness with which some fat courtier in full dress, sword and bag, would run and scuffle to pick it up.[133]
Fuseli took his place as Keeper of the Academy in 1805. Smirke had been elected, but George III., hearing that he was a democrat, refused to confirm the appointment. Haydon, who called on Fuseli in Berners Street in 1805, when he had left his father the bookseller at Plymouth, describes him as “a little white-headed, lion-faced man, in an old flannel dressing-gown tied round his waist with a piece of rope, and upon his head the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work-basket.” His gallery was full of galvanised devils, malicious witches brewing incantations, Satan bridging chaos or springing upwards like a pyramid of fire, Lady Macbeth, Paolo and Francesca, Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly.
Elsewhere the impetuous Haydon sketches him vigorously. Fuseli was about five feet five inches high, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb, but kept it upon his stone slab, and being very near-sighted and too vain to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or blue, and plaster it over a shoulder or a face; then prying close in, he would turn round and say, “By Gode! dat’s a fine purple! it’s very like Correggio, by Gode!” and then all of a sudden burst out with a quotation from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or the Niebelungen, and say, “Paint dat!” “I found him,” says Haydon, “a most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness. He put me in mind of Archimago in Spenser.”[134]
When Haydon came first to town from Plymouth, he lodged at 342 Strand,[135] near Charing Cross, and close to his fellow-student, the good-natured, indolent, clever Jackson. The very morning he arrived he hurried off to the Exhibition, and mistaking the new church in the Strand for Somerset House, ran up the steps and offered his shilling to a beadle. When he at last found the right house, Opie’s Gil Blas and Westall’s Shipwrecked Sailor Boy were all the historical pictures he could find.
Sir Joshua read his first discourse before the Academy in 1769. Barry commenced his lectures in 1784, ended them in 1798, and was expelled the Academy in 1799. Opie delivered his lectures in 1807, the year in which he died. Fuseli began in 1801, and delivered but twelve lectures in all.