The King's Artists, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840: Francis Russell welcomes an authoritative study of the role of the Royal Academy in British life during its first eighty years

The King's Artists, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840 Holger Hoock Clarendon Press, Oxford, 50 [pounds sterling] (cloth) ISBN 0 19 926626 3

The importance of the Royal Academy in the cultural life of England has long been recognised, but Hoock's exemplary volume is the first survey of this in the widest political and institutional context. The early history of the Academy is analysed, as is its role in the encouragement of a national school and as model for institutions in the provinces, in Scotland, Ireland and the former American colonies. Hoock considers the position of King George III--whose chosen portraitist Allan Ramsay was not an academician--and ways in which both those who supported the establishment of the day and those who did not influenced the academy.

Hoock's chapter on the 'spectacle of exhibitions' is particularly compelling. The third and final section, 'forging the cultural state', is prefaced by a summary of the activities of the Academy's most assiduous politician, Joseph Farington, in 1798. The Academy's involvement in such crucial matters as customs duties, taxation and copyright is outlined, as is its contribution to the project to commission the great series of monuments to the heroes of the French wars, most notably at St Paul's and of the evidence submitted by academicians to the inquiry that preceded the purchase of the Elgin Marbles.

The balance between the individual influence of particular artists and that of the corporate body to which they belonged is not always easy to determine. And any consideration of the activities of the RA has to consider how dangerous the insidious disease that this reviewer terms 'establishmentitis' can be in the United Kingdom: Sir Martin Archer Shee's influence on the decision not to secure Sir Thomas Lawrence's Old Master drawings for the nation was as baneful as that of at least one of his more recent successors on planning enquiries.

Hoock's detailed examination of the archives at Burlington House, of the papers of individual artists and of official records gives this study an impressive authority. His readers will be delighted by Lord Camelford's statement--on the issue of custom duties--that 'the idea of taxing poor young men at their return to England ... is gothic to the last degree'; but, in the light of the current exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, they will be aware that contrary to Hoock's suggestion of reliance on the advice of Charles Long or household officials, King George III would have been quite as qualified as any of these to select the designs for the monuments at St Paul's in 1796: this reviewer likes to think he did so.

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