A Stare Case

Our regular contributor, Barrie Sheppard, provides another titillating insight into the ‘Georgian art world’. Barrie writes: Before occupying its present quarters (Burlington House on Piccadilly) in 1869, the Royal Academy had four homes. It first briefly occupied cramped rooms in Pall Mall.  In 1771, it took up residence in the old Somerset House on the Strand, then a royal palace. 1780 saw it transferred into the first completed wing of the new Somerset House, built on the same site, which is today the home of the Courtauld Institute. Then in 1837, it moved to the east wing of the new National Gallery building on Trafalgar Square; but in time it also proved too small, and in 1868, exactly 100 years after it was established, it moved to its present location.

Within the new Somerset House of 1771, the ceiling of the room containing the “Academy of Antiques” and the Library was decorated with a large work by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is of a beautiful young woman, elegant and majestic, seated on clouds, contemplating the heavens. She holds a scroll on which is written:  THEORY is the knowledge of what is truly NATURE, the dictum that recurs as a theme in Reynolds’ Discourses. He called the painting “Theory”. I rather think Reynolds could have done better with his title. To me it is uninspiring, banal and cold, given the beauty of the image he created.  If knowledge is truly knowledge of Nature, why not “Nature”, or “Truth. Or even “Beauty”, given that Sir Joshua believed that where truth and nature are, there beauty is.  “Theory” now graces a room in Burlington House.

The Academy’s rooms in the new Somerset House were served by a grand, spiral staircase of 104 steps rising to its fifth floor. Giuseppe Baretti, the Academy’s Secretary of Foreign Correspondence, wrote in a guide to the new quarters that the staircase was:

‘a constant moving picture of every gay and brilliant Object which graces the Beau-Monde of this vast Capital, pleasantly contrasted with wise Connoisseurs (art collectors) and sprightly Dilettantes (art lovers) of every size and denomination’.

The long climb up the staircase proved difficult for some. When Queen Charlotte attended Academy exhibitions, a chair had to be placed on each of the landings so that she could rest at each on her ascent.

Some journalists loved the staircase for the opportunities for risqué copy it afforded. Of the 1785 Exhibition, the Morning Post informed its readers that some patrons “perambulate the rooms to view the heads, others remain at the bottom to view the legs”.  The World Fashionable Advertiser opined in 1787  that “although some exhibitions might have more merit, none was so attractive as that at Somerset House, for beside the exhibition of pictures living and inanimate, there is the raree-show (peep show) of neat ankles up the staircase – which is not less inviting.”

And twenty or so years later, the satirical cartoonist, Thomas Rowlandson, saw it similarly in his caricature The Academy Stare (sic) Case, in which a cascading tumble of patrons, many upturned showing much more than ankles, stare at the nude drawings on the wall (Baretti’s “gay and brilliant objects”), as well as the leg show.

The Academy’s occupation of Somerset House was controlled by strict rules laid down by the governors of the building. On taking occupation, the Academy was informed by letter from The Secretary to the Lords of the Treasury that:

‘…you are to signify to the officers of the Academy that they, their families, servants, tradesman, and visitors are to use for their apartments the stair of communication only, and not to use the great stair for any common purposes.

…and as the residence of the secretary of the Academy is an indulgence lately proposed, which upon trial may be found inconvenient, or the rooms he occupies be hereafter wanted for other purposes, you are to signify to him that he holds the same merely at pleasure, to be resumed when it shall be thought proper…‘

Sir Joshua, Director of the Academy, had clearly failed, thus far, to achieve his goal of raising the social status of the artist in Britain beyond that of the artisan (a status seen by some as just one step above that of dressmakers), to that of liberal artist comparable in status to that of the poet.

“Tradesmen this way”