‘[T]he Royal Academy, and the effects produced by it’: accounting for art education in 1835

Abstract

State funded art education in England began by offering a political view of the Royal Academy of Arts from the perspective of the social, commercial and cultural consequences of its existence. This article shows how the conceptualization and initiation of state funded art education in England in the 1830s raised the question of how the social determinants of fine art practice were to be taken into account in the configuration of the art institution within industrial capitalism. The specifically utilitarian and consequentialist ethos that informed the beginnings of state funding of art education in England showed that what matters is not only which items are taken into account in the social constitution of art educational institutions, but whether they can be fully taken into account within the terms of an education in art. The continuing relevance of the political experiments in state funded art education in the 1830s is in the link that was made between a political redefinition of the Royal Academy of Arts and the institution of the state funded art school as a new form of pedagogy under capital.

Notes on contributor

Malcolm Quinn is Professor of Cultural and Political History, Associate Dean of Research and Director of Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Graduate School, University of the Arts London. His current research engages with ideas that were foundational for state funded art education in England – utility, taste, wellbeing, cultural prejudice and social equity. The identification of this set of foundational concepts has developed from his historical work on how the state funded art school emerged from a utilitarian critique of the academy of art.

Notes

1. See Saumarez-Smith (2010, 83): ‘It was the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that led to the belief in the improving role of art for wider purposes of public education. Parliamentarians such as William Ewart, Benjamin Hawes and Joseph Hume, the so-called Philosophical Radicals, led to the provision of public institutions of art, under the influence of utilitarian beliefs. They believed that art had a wide social, political and educational value, should be taken away from the clutches of the traditional connoisseurs and used, instead, as an instrument of social amelioration. They suggested the establishment of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835, and introduced the bill that led to the establishment of the Fine Arts Commission and supported the Museums Act in 1845. [Henry] Cole was influenced by the utilitarians and met Bentham just before his death in 1832.’

2. Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 29, col. 553–555 (14 July 1835).

3. Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 27, col. 1187 (18 May 1835).

4. Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 49, cols. 1036–1037 (30 July 1839).