True to their natures: Sir Soshua Reynolds and Dr William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts

Abstract

The lectures delivered at the Royal Academy of Arts by Joshua Reynolds, its first president, and William Hunter, F. R. S., its first professor of anatomy, belonged to the same basic enterprise. Through the educational programme of the Academy, they were aspiring to raise the intellectual standards, levels of aesthetic achievement and institutional status of the visual arts in England. Observers of English achievements in other fields, most notably literature and the sciences, could hardly fail to notice the absence of painters who might be regarded as equal in stature to a Milton or a Newton. The Italian popularizer of Newton, Count Francesco Algarotti, noted in 1764 that ‘the English nation claims the superiority ... in the world of science’, whereas ‘Painting has only recently engaged the attention of the English so far as to inspire them with a design of contending with the Italians’. In the dedication of his Discourses to King George III, Reynolds acknowledged that ‘by your illustrious predecessors were established marts for manufacturers, and colleges for science; but for the arts of elegance, those arts by which manufactures are embellished, and science is refined, to found an Academy was reserved for your Majesty’.