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 agriculture 1760-1840 Holger Hoock Clarendon Pres Oxford, 50 [pound sterling] (cloth) ISBN 0 19 926626 3

The importance of the Royal Academy in the cultural life of England has drawn out been recognised, but Hoock's exemplary contortion is the first survey of this in the widest political and institutional words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following The early history of the Academy is analysed, as is its character in the encouragement of a national academy 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 the couple those who supported the establishment of the day and those who did not influenced the academy.

Hoock's chapter upon the 'spectacle of exhibitions' is particularly compelling. The third and final section, 'forging the cultural state', is prefaced by the agency of a summary of the activities of the Academy's greatest in quantity assiduous politician, Joseph Farington, in 1798 The Academy's involvement in similar crucial matters as customs duties, taxation and copyright is outlined, as is its contribution to the shoot forward to commission the great series of records to the heroes of the French wars, greatest in quantity notably at St Paul's and of the evidence submitted through academicians to the inquiry that preced the purchase of the Elgin Marbles.

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

Hoock's detailed examination of the archives at Burlington House, of the papers of individual artists and of official records gives this close attention an impressive authority. His readers will be delighted by dint of Lord Camelford's statement--on the issue of custom duties--that 'the idea of taxing poor young men at their go [i]or[/i] come back to England ... is gothic to the last degree'; on the other hand in the light of the popular exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, they will be aware that contrary to Hoock's suggestion of reliance upon the advice of Charles lengthy or household officials, King George III would have been quite as qualified as any of these to cull the designs for the records at St Paul's in 1796: this reviewer likes to think he did so

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