Foreword

Murdoch, John

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Foreword

John Murdoch

Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836

~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...

Author

John Murdoch

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00023.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18329

Foreword

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 Reynolds and the flowering of the genius of Turner and Constable. At every annual exhibition, painters struggled to secure the best places for their works in the Great Room, as near as possible to the famous ‘Line’, the wooden moulding that still runs around the walls at a distance of some eight feet from the floor. Ambitious pictures of historical subjects, executed in the ‘grand manner’, and boldly coloured portraits of famous sitters by leading Academicians were usually to be found in the most privileged positions, with their frames resting ‘on the Line’ itself. Meanwhile, paintings with delicate or highly wrought surfaces tended to be shown beneath, at eye-level or even lower. Other works were ‘skied’ – hung almost invisibly in the ceiling cove. A worse fate was to be left out of the Great Room altogether and to be consigned to a space of much lesser prestige. Historians have long thought that it was the nature of such annual exhibitions, the crowded, intensely emulative conditions under which artists showed their work, that motivated many of the developments in European art at the beginning of the modern period. The present project sets out to test these ideas in practice, by presenting the actual pictures in the very space in which they were first seen by the public and where artists annually placed their reputations ‘on the line’, in the eyes of their rivals, of critics and connoisseurs, and of the public at large.

We have been honoured and delighted to receive the Patronage of her Majesty the Queen in this undertaking, and to have received the active support of the Trustees and staff of the Royal Collection Trust through loans of paintings for the exhibition. From the beginning, the project has been developed in partnership with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and has been strongly supported by all the principal public and private collections of British art throughout the country. We have received also the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Rose Foundation, the Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation, White Public Relations and the group of Courtauld Exhibition Patrons, including especially Mr Danny Katz and Nicholas and Judith Goodison. To them, and to another warm supporter of our work who wishes to remain anonymous, I should like to express our thanks.

As the exhibition opens, it will effectively launch a season in which, with the opening of the new Tate Britain and the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other major events in Europe and North America, the achievements of artists working in Britain will be the focus of international celebration. It is fitting that the season should begin in Sir William Chambers’s Great Room at Somerset House, now happily again becoming familiar to Londoners as one of the capital’s leading exhibition spaces.

John Murdoch
Director
Courtauld Institute Gallery

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BOOKArt on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836

David H. Solkin (Editor)

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00023

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18327

On May 1, 1780, England’s Royal Academy of Arts opened its twelfth annual exhibition, the first to be held in the magnificent rooms of William Chambers’s newly built Somerset House. For the next fifty-seven years, the Great Room of Somerset House effectively defined the center of the London art world--the place where viewers had to see and be seen, and where artists fiercely vied for the attention of potential buyers. Such great exhibition performers as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and David Wilkie sharpened their skills during these stimulating decades. In this extensively illustrated book, seventeen renowned experts revisit and assess the Somerset House years, a period of great achievement and central importance in the history of British art.

The book’s contributors view the Somerset House phenomenon from a broad range of perspectives. They deal with the physical nature of the exhibitions, the audience, the role of the press, the Royal Academy’s place within the larger world of urban entertainments, and how the conditions of display shaped and even transformed patterns of art production. In addition, they explore such topics as the tactics of exhibitors in different genres of painting, the exhibition histories of works in other media, and the impact on foreign artists and observers of an increasingly self-confident national school of British art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Author

David H. Solkin (Editor)

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Print publication date November 2001 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300090918

EISBN 9780300248098

Illustrations 221

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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