Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England consists of papers first delivered at a conference at the University of York in 2008. It is presented as a “companion volume” to Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, David H. Solkin’s exhibition and edited book (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001), which so memorably reconstructed the Royal Academy’s exhibitions at Somerset House between 1780 and 1836. More generally, the present volume builds on a now substantial body of scholarship on the commercial, discursive, and institutional structures of the British art world in the decades immediately before and after the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. It also represents a partial return to the traditions of monographic art history, since each essay focuses on an individual artist and, in a number of cases, draws on a larger research project concerned with the artist in question.

The overarching aim, as outlined by Sarah Monks in her introduction, is to consider the Royal Academy as a “lived [sic] organism,” one that functioned as “a reference point toward, around, and against which artists operated in their relationships with each other and with artistic practice itself,” and “to complicate notions of a monolithic ossifying institution from which many of the ‘best’ artists of the period were ‘liberated’” (1). To this end, the authors set out to explore the various ways in which artists working in the Royal Academy’s ambit sought to negotiate the ambiguities and tensions of the institution and its ideals—along with the potential benefits and undoubted pressures that it presented to them—as they strove to forge a practice, a career, and an identity for themselves. As Monks observes, this project raises questions of subjectivity, agency, and experience. Drawing on the insights afforded by sociological approaches, she emphasizes that, while these practices, careers, and identities may have been constructed with reference to the Royal Academy and its ideals, the forms they took depended on the material conditions of artists’ lives, on the minutiae of their social and even bodily existences.

The nine essays present case studies of eight artists who together exemplify a wide range of relationships to the institution. Conspicuous by their absence, however, are the three academicians who conventionally dominate the heroic narrative of artistic emancipation that the book sets out to challenge or complicate, namely Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable. Although undoubtedly motivated by the laudable aim of giving lesser-known artists their due, this omission has the inadvertent effect of suggesting that such canonical figures transcend the type of institution-focused research represented by this book. More broadly, it indicates an unresolved tension between the sociological objectives outlined in the introduction and the commitment to an artist-centered model of art history apparent in its structure.

The most renowned artist who does appear in Living with the Royal Academy is the Royal Academy’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose case is considered by Mark Hallett in the opening essay. A detailed exploration of the artist’s submission to the first annual exhibition in 1769, it revisits and refines the familiar argument that Reynolds sought to raise the status of portraiture by incorporating historical elements into his paintings, particularly those of female sitters. Hallett contends that the pictures Reynolds chose for the exhibition catered at once to the connoisseurial tastes of his aristocratic patrons and to the larger vogue for sensibility in British culture, following the precedent set by recent history painting. Reynolds’s paintings therefore served to affirm the artist’s worthiness to occupy his exalted position in the Royal Academy while also ensuring the works had wide appeal. Although the argument is persuasive, the connections between Reynolds’s identity as an artist and his role as president might have been more fully explored.

Like Hallett, Monks takes Johann Zoffany’s celebrated group portrait of the founding members of the Royal Academy as the starting point of her essay, but she focuses on one of the more obscure figures thus commemorated, Dominic Serres, a French-born specialist in the lowly (by academic standards) art of marine painting. Considering Serres within the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cleft habitus, Monks seeks to show how Serres’s work and career were shaped by the pressures of his outsider status. Monks adroitly teases out the tensions of the artist’s position, which, she argues, were exacerbated by the defeats suffered by the British in the American War of Independence. Political issues come to the fore in an essay by John Barrell, who makes a compelling case for identifying the sculptor Thomas Banks as a “radical activist” (132, 143). A close reading of his interrogation by the Privy Council in 1794, in conjunction with a mass of other documentary sources, substantiates this claim. Yet, as Barrell ultimately states, Banks’s “loyalty to the institution . . . trumped his political convictions” (149); indeed, he made common cause with his colleagues in the Royal Academy to secure the expulsion of James Barry, the artist conventionally—although Barrell contends, erroneously—considered to be the most politically radical member. Surprisingly, Barrell restricts his concluding remarks on Banks’s sculpture to the portrait busts of fellow radicals that he produced during the revolutionary decades; he does not consider the possibility that the political significance of the artist’s work might extend beyond its iconography.

Another artist featured in the book, Joseph Wright, was never a full member of the Royal Academy. Curiously, in a thoughtful exploration of Wright’s complex relationship with the London art world in the latter part of his career, John Bonehill does not discuss the artist’s refusal of membership in 1784—presumably because the reason so clearly lies in the humiliation Wright had previously suffered in seeing a far lesser-known artist elected to the honor in preference to himself. Instead, Bonehill analyzes the discursive construction of Wright’s public persona in terms of a disdain for financial gain, a preference for rural retirement, and, above all, a delicate sensibility. These perceived qualities served to distance him from his London-based peers and enhance his reputation as an artist of “singular genius” (104), thereby paradoxically ensuring that his paintings sold well. By contrast, Iain McCalman’s treatment of an altogether bolder and brasher artist, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, betrays an uncertain grasp of the complexities of the eighteenth-century art world, particularly that of Paris, where the artist began his career. Most perplexing is the description of Denis Diderot as “the brilliant, wilful critic whose toxic reviews had generated his nickname of ‘the blind cockatrice’” (77) and the accompanying assumption that Loutherbourg was his protégé and recipient of his advice. McCalman seems unaware that Diderot’s reviews circulated privately to a select group of foreign subscribers, remaining unknown to a domestic audience until much later. Nor will his supposed revelations about the reasons for Loutherbourg’s move to London in 1772 come as a surprise to readers of Olivier Lefeuvre’s recent monograph on the artist (Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 1740–1812, Paris: Arthena, 2012), though, in fairness, Lefeuvre’s volume was probably published after Living with the Royal Academy went to press.

Of the remaining essays, Ann Bermingham’s examination of Benjamin West’s abortive project for a series of scenes from the Book of Revelation stands out for its scrupulous attention to the complex interaction of institutional dynamics, national politics, and personal loyalties. As Bermingham persuasively argues, the cancellation of the commission for the chapel at Windsor Castle, for which the paintings had been conceived, was likely due, in part, to the royal architect, James Wyatt. Wyatt seems to have played upon George III’s fears of West’s democratic sympathies for reasons that can be traced to personal and political conflicts within the Royal Academy. The cancellation of the commission in 1801 was probably also related to the king’s reported antipathy to West’s apocalyptic subject matter, presumably reflecting, in turn, the radical political associations that the Book of Revelations had taken on in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. As Bermingham further contends, however, the artist’s interest in such themes stemmed from his Quaker origins and pacifist inclinations. Another unfortunate episode in West’s career, the purported discovery of the Venetian Secret—to which he and some of his colleagues fell prey in 1796–97—is discussed by Rosie Dias. She takes the hoax as the starting point for an illuminating exploration of the academicians’ engagement with technical matters and how these affected their relationships with each other. The prevalence in their working practice of “secrecy and auto-didacticism” (116), which had made them susceptible to the hoax, gradually gave way to a more scientific approach and, with it, an enhanced appreciation of color. West, both in his own practice and in his capacity as the Royal Academy’s president, played a crucial role in this shift, which contributed to the association of the British school of painting with the Venetian colorist.

Similarly wide-ranging is Martin Myrone’s essay, which uses the case of William Etty as the focus for an exploration of artistic recruitment and formation in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the artists of his generation, Etty stood out for his unwavering devotion to the Royal Academy and its practices, as is most obviously demonstrated by the prominence of the nude in his work. Additionally, as a provincial youth of humble origins, he was exceptional in making a career for himself despite coming from a background without any connections to the art world. Like Monks, Myrone draws on the work of Bourdieu and argues that Etty provides an exemplary instance of the heightened self-consciousness and contradictory tendencies toward conformity and transgression associated with cleft habitus. Moreover, he concludes, the example of Etty suggests that tensions are constitutive of artistic identity in the modern world. Myrone’s essay best fulfills the sociological agenda outlined by Monks in the introduction, and, in so doing, brings into play a larger historical frame of reference that remains underdeveloped elsewhere.

While the simple fact of the Royal Academy’s existence from 1768 onwards as the central institution of the British art world works well enough as a point of departure, the avoidance of any overarching historical narrative leaves the latter end of the period strangely ill-defined. Although the book’s blurb points out that 1848 marked the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the date gets only a fleeting mention in the introduction. A direct reference to the Pre-Raphaelites does not appear until the final essay, in which Jason Edwards offers a reassessment of the sculptor Thomas Gibson, best known for The Tinted Venus (1851–56). In the manner of much revisionist scholarship on nineteenth-century academic art, Edwards seeks to demonstrate that Gibson’s work shares greater commonalities with the progressive (and hence more canonical) art of the period than he has been given credit for. His argument is structured around the nice conceit of a history that moves backwards from the New Sculpture of the late nineteenth century to the early history of the Royal Academy. What is needed, both here and generally, however, is a more sustained analysis of the complex and shifting interrelationship of the categories of the academic and the modern, as well as those of the British and the cosmopolitan, over the whole period. Nevertheless, the many fascinating insights offered by Living with the Royal Academy make a useful contribution toward the rewriting of the history of British art during the first century or so of the Royal Academy’s existence.