Audio from a talk at Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
Charles Saumarez Smith, Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, speaks about the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768. He reveals the strong personalities involved, the rivalries and intrigues that divided them, the competing ideas about the teaching and exhibition of art, and the problems of governance that forged the Royal Academy, and continue to reverberate within it today, some 250 years later.