NEW SOMERSET HOUSE WAS A BUILDING with a programme. At a practical level it was intended primarily for the housing of public offices, the need for which was the result of a growth in the machinery of government characteristic of modernizing states in the later seventeenth and eighteenth...

~THIS BOOK, TOGETHER WITH THE EXHIBITION that it accompanies, examines the history of the Royal Academy exhibitions that took place annually in Somerset House between 1780 and 1836. These years were in many ways the crucial period for British art, a period spanning the last phase of Gainsborough’s career, the Discourses of Sir Joshua...