First Discourse

Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, January 2nd, 1769,
by the President

Gentlemen,--An academy in which the polite arts may be regularly
cultivated is at last opened among us by royal munificence. This
must appear an event in the highest degree interesting, not only to
the artists, but to the whole nation.

It is indeed difficult to give any other reason why an Empire like
that of Britain should so long have wanted an ornament so suitable
to its greatness than that slow progression of things which
naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence
and power.

An institution like this has often been recommended upon
considerations merely mercantile. But an academy founded upon such
principles can never effect even its own narrow purposes. If it
has an origin no higher, no taste can ever be formed in it which
can be useful even in manufactures; but if the higher arts of
design flourish, these inferior ends will be answered of course.

We are happy in having a prince who has conceived the design of
such an institution, according to its true dignity, and promotes
the arts, as the head of a great, a learned, a polite, and a
commercial nation; and I can now congratulate you, gentlemen, on
the accomplishment of your long and ardent wishes.

The numberless and ineffectual consultations that I have had with
many in this assembly, to form plans and concert schemes for an
academy, afford a sufficient proof of the impossibility of
succeeding but by the influence of Majesty. But there have,
perhaps, been times when even the influence of Majesty would have
been ineffectual, and it is pleasing to reflect that we are thus
embodied, when every circumstance seems to concur from which honour
and prosperity can probably arise.

There are at this time a greater number of excellent artists than
were ever known before at one period in this nation; there is a
general desire among our nobility to be distinguished as lovers and
judges of the arts; there is a greater superfluity of wealth among
the people to reward the professors; and, above all, we are
patronised by a monarch, who, knowing the value of science and of
elegance, thinks every art worthy of his notice that tends to
soften and humanise the mind.

After so much has been done by his Majesty, it will be wholly our
fault if our progress is not in some degree correspondent to the
wisdom and, generosity of the institution; let us show our
gratitude in our diligence, that, though our merit may not answer
his expectations, yet, at least, our industry may deserve his
protection.

But whatever may be our proportion of success, of this we may be
sure, that the present institution will at least contribute to
advance our knowledge of the arts, and bring us nearer to that
ideal excellence which it is the lot of genius always to
contemplate and never to attain.

The principal advantage of an academy is, that, besides furnishing
able men to direct the student, it will be a repository for the
great examples of the art. These are the materials on which genius
is to work, and without which the strongest intellect may be
fruitlessly or deviously employed. By studying these authentic
models, that idea of excellence which is the result of the
accumulated experience of past ages may be at once acquired, and
the tardy and obstructed progress of our predecessors may teach us
a shorter and easier way. The student receives at one glance the
principles which many artists have spent their whole lives in
ascertaining; and, satisfied with their effect, is spared the
painful investigation by which they come to be known and fixed.
How many men of great natural abilities have been lost to this
nation for want of these advantages? They never had an opportunity
of seeing those masterly efforts of genius which at once kindle the
whole soul, and force it into sudden and irresistible approbation.

Raffaelle, it is true, had not the advantage of studying in an
academy; but all Rome, and the works of Michael Angelo in
particular, were to him an academy. On the site of the Capel la
Sistina he immediately from a dry, Gothic, and even insipid manner,
which attends to the minute accidental discriminations of
particular and individual objects, assumed that grand style of
painting, which improves partial representation by the general and
invariable ideas of nature.

Every seminary of learning may be said to be surrounded with an
atmosphere of floating knowledge, where every mind may imbibe
somewhat congenial to its own original conceptions. Knowledge,
thus obtained, has always something more popular and useful than
that which is forced upon the mind by private precepts or solitary
meditation. Besides, it is generally found that a youth more
easily receives instruction from the companions of his studies,
whose minds are nearly on a level with his own, than from those who
are much his superiors; and it is from his equals only that he
catches the fire of emulation.

One advantage, I will venture to affirm, we shall have in our
academy, which no other nation can boast. We shall have nothing to
unlearn. To this praise the present race of artists have a just
claim. As far as they have yet proceeded they are right. With us
the exertions of genius will henceforward be directed to their
proper objects. It will not be as it has been in other schools,
where he that travelled fastest only wandered farthest from the
right way.

Impressed as I am, therefore, with such a favourable opinion of my
associates in this undertaking, it would ill become me to dictate
to any of them. But as these institutions have so often failed in
other nations, and as it is natural to think with regret how much
might have been done, and how little has been done, I must take
leave to offer a few hints, by which those errors may be rectified,
and those defects supplied. These the professors and visitors may
reject or adopt as they shall think proper.

I would chiefly recommend that an implicit obedience to the rules
of art, as established by the great masters, should be exacted from
the YOUNG students. That those models, which have passed through
the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect
and infallible guides as subjects for their imitation, not their
criticism.

I am confident that this is the only efficacious method of making a
progress in the arts; and that he who sets out with doubting will
find life finished before he becomes master of the rudiments. For
it may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by presuming on
his own sense has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced
them. Every opportunity, therefore, should be taken to
discountenance that false and vulgar opinion that rules are the
fetters of genius. They are fetters only to men of no genius; as
that armour, which upon the strong becomes an ornament and a
defence, upon the weak and misshapen turns into a load, and
cripples the body which it was made to protect.

How much liberty may be taken to break through those rules, and, as
the poet expresses it,

" To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,"

may be an after consideration, when the pupils become masters
themselves. It is then, when their genius has received its utmost
improvement, that rules may possibly be dispensed with. But let us
not destroy the scaffold until we have raised the building.

The directors ought more particularly to watch over the genius of
those students who, being more advanced, are arrived at that
critical period of study, on the nice management of which their
future turn of taste depends. At that age it is natural for them
to be more captivated with what is brilliant than with what is
solid, and to prefer splendid negligence to painful and humiliating
exactness.

A facility in composing, a lively, and what is called a masterly
handling the chalk or pencil, are, it must be confessed,
captivating qualities to young minds, and become of course the
objects of their ambition. They endeavour to imitate those
dazzling excellences, which they will find no great labour in
attaining. After much time spent in these frivolous pursuits, the
difficulty will be to retreat; but it will be then too late; and
there is scarce an instance of return to scrupulous labour after
the mind has been debauched and deceived by this fallacious
mastery.

By this useless industry they are excluded from all power of
advancing in real excellence. Whilst boys, they are arrived at
their utmost perfection; they have taken the shadow for the
substance; and make that mechanical facility the chief excellence
of the art, which is only an ornament, and of the merit of which
few but painters themselves are judges.

This seems to me to be one of the most dangerous sources of
corruption; and I speak of it from experience, not as an error
which may possibly happen, but which has actually infected all
foreign academies. The directors were probably pleased with this
premature dexterity in their pupils, and praised their despatch at
the expense of their correctness.

But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being
thought masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural
sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the
prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness.
The impetuosity of youth is distrusted at the slow approaches of a
regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take
the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to
excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other
means than those which the indispensable rules of art have
prescribed. They must, therefore, be told again and again that
labour is the only price of solid fame, and that whatever their
force of genius may be, there is no easy method of becoming a good
painter.

When we read the lives of the most eminent painters, every page
informs us that no part of their time was spent in dissipation.
Even an increase of fame served only to augment their industry. To
be convinced with what persevering assiduity they pursued their
studies, we need only reflect on their method of proceeding in
their most celebrated works. When they conceived a subject, they
first made a variety of sketches; then a finished drawing of the
whole; after that a more correct drawing of every separate part,
heads, hands, feet, and pieces of drapery; they then painted the
picture, and after all re-touched it from the life. The pictures,
thus wrought with such pain, now appear like the effect of
enchantment, and as if some mighty genius had struck them off at a
blow.

But, whilst diligence is thus recommended to the students, the
visitors will take care that their diligence be effectual; that it
be well directed and employed on the proper object. A student is
not always advancing because he is employed; he must apply his
strength to that part of the art where the real difficulties lie;
to that part which distinguishes it as a liberal art, and not by
mistaken industry lose his time in that which is merely ornamental.
The students, instead of vying with each other which shall have the
readiest band, should be taught to contend who shall have the
purest and most correct outline, instead of striving which shall
produce the brightest tint, or, curiously trifling endeavour to
give the gloss of stuffs so as to appear real, let their ambition
be directed to contend which shall dispose his drapery in the most
graceful folds, which shall give the most grace and dignity to the
human figure.

I must beg leave to submit one thing more to the consideration of
the visitors, which appears to me a matter of very great
consequence, and the omission of which I think a principal defect
in the method of education pursued in all the academies I have ever
visited. The error I mean is, that the students never draw exactly
from the living models which they have before them. It is not
indeed their intention, nor are they directed to do it. Their
drawings resemble the model only in the attitude. They change the
form according to their vague and uncertain ideas of beauty, and
make a drawing rather of what they think the figure ought to be
than of what it appears. I have thought this the obstacle that has
stopped the progress of many young men of real genius; and I very
much doubt whether a habit of drawing correctly what we see will
not give a proportionable power of drawing correctly what we
imagine. He who endeavours to copy nicely the figure before him
not only acquires a habit of exactness and precision, but is
continually advancing in his knowledge of the human figure; and
though he seems to superficial observers to make a slower progress,
he will be found at last capable of adding (without running into
capricious wildness) that grace and beauty which is necessary to be
given to his more finished works, and which cannot be got by the
moderns, as it was not acquired by the ancients, but by an
attentive and well-compared study of the human form.

What I think ought to enforce this method is, that it has been the
practice (as may be seen by their drawings) of the great masters in
the art. I will mention a drawing of Raffaelle, "The Dispute of
the Sacrament," the print of which, by Count Cailus, is in every
hand. It appears that he made his sketch from one model; and the
habit he had of drawing exactly from the form before him appears by
his making all the figures with the same cap, such as his model
then happened to wear; so servile a copyist was this great man,
even at a time when he was allowed to be at his highest pitch of
excellence.

I have seen also academy figures by Annibale Caracci, though he was
often sufficiently licentious in his finished works, drawn with all
the peculiarities of an individual model.

This scrupulous exactness is so contrary to the practice of the
academies, that it is not without great deference that I beg leave
to recommend it to the consideration of the visitors, and submit it
to them, whether the neglect of this method is not one of the
reasons why students so often disappoint expectation, and being
more than boys at sixteen, become less than men at thirty.

In short, the method I recommend can only be detrimental when there
are but few living forms to copy; for then students, by always
drawing from one alone, will by habit be taught to overlook
defects, and mistake deformity for beauty. But of this there is no
danger, since the council has determined to supply the academy with
a variety of subjects; and indeed those laws which they have drawn
up, and which the secretary will presently read for your
confirmation, have in some measure precluded me from saying more
upon this occasion. Instead, therefore, of offering my advice,
permit me to indulge my wishes, and express my hope, that this
institution may answer the expectations of its royal founder; that
the present age may vie in arts with that of Leo X. and that "the
dignity of the dying art" (to make use of an expression of Pliny)
may be revived under the reign of George III.