A question of all hanging together

The Royal Academy has had the brilliant and brave idea of asking James Fenton to write its history. Fenton is not only a great poet, but also one of Britain’s most interesting writers on art. In his first collection Terminal Moraine (1972) he published a beautiful poem on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and I find that I have carried with me from one museum job to another cuttings of his articles from the New York Review of Books and the Guardian.

He begins with Zoffany’s group portrait of the 36 artists who founded the Academy in 1768 in order to exhibit contemporary art and to teach young artists to be as good as the French and Italians. However, he has more fun reading the memoirs of the first students, and acquainting himself with the casts they drew from — still lined up today in the corridors in the Royal Academy Schools. A favourite of the students was ‘Smugglerius’, their nickname for the figure of a hanged smuggler who was stripped of his skin and, while still warm and soft, placed in the pose of the Roman statue of The Dying Gladiator, and then cast in plaster. As the teenagers drew they pelted each other with clay or bread (used for rubbing out pencil until replaced, one recalled, ‘by a sort of plumbed India rubber’) and ‘teized [sic] the Keeper by imitating cats’. It seems that they held the Keepers in less awe than male models such as the Lifeguardsman Shaw — a hero of Waterloo — or the street paviour whose splendid torso appeared in pictures by seven different artists at the exhibition of 1772. Each autumn he walked home to York. Why not winter in London? ‘Because coals be cheaper in the north, and warmth be the life of an old man.