The Making of an Artist: The Great Tradition
The Collection Gallery, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
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The Making of an Artist: The Great Tradition
Does great art begin with studying nature, or studying the great art of the past? Decide for yourself in this gallery, bringing together highlights from the RA Collection.
What makes great art? Our first President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, believed that the art of the past was the most important source of inspiration, but this was challenged by later Academicians like JMW Turner and John Constable. Although both still included references to historic art in their work, they also drew inspiration from nature, spending long hours capturing the world they saw around them. The Making of an Artist: The Great Tradition presents the people who founded the RA, their ideas about art, and how those ideas changed over the next 50 years.
The gallery includes many of the RA’s exemplars of earlier art, including Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo and an almost full-size 16th-century copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper and casts of key classical sculptures, notably the Belvedere Torso. It also shows the results of Constable’s determination to work from nature, including several of his cloud studies, and Turner’s Dolbadern Castle, given to the RA on his election as a Royal Academician.
The display is curated by the current President of the RA, painter Christopher Le Brun, who observes that when the RA was founded, the main carrier of ideas in art was the nude male figure, but in the hands of Constable, the main carrier of meaning became “the stuff of nature”, including the most transient effects such as clouds and passing rain showers.
From 12 January 2019
Daily 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Free, no booking required.
The Collection Gallery, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
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Mali Morris RA Selects
The Cabinet, 6 Apr – 4 Aug 2019
Timed to coincide with her Tennant Gallery show, the artist has also selected a variety of works from the RA Collection on the theme of “immediacy”, in a cabinet display within our Collection Gallery. Searching for examples of directness of handling and expression, Morris has chosen oil studies by Constable, pencil drawings by Turner and Gainsborough, alongside commonplace examples of studio life, such as doodles, shopping lists, painting tools and materials.
The displays are also accompanied by the first monograph to present the full range of Mali Morris’s work, entitled Mali Morris: Painting.
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Gallery
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John, known as the Taddei Tondo, c.1504–05.
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The Making of an Artist
The Making of an Artist encompasses three new displays of the RA Collection, exploring ideas about what makes great art and art training. In addition to The Great Tradition, you’ll find:
Learning to Draw
The Julia and Hans Rausing Hall
The RA has always had an art school. This display illustrates how art has been taught here over the past 250 years and gives a glimpse of what happens now.Learning about Architecture
Dorfman Architecture Court
Aspiring architects in the 18th-century RA Schools honed their craft by copying casts taken from classical buildings. This display brings those casts together, revealing another aspect of traditional artistic training.
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Try Smartify in the galleries
Learn more about each work, or take a tour
During your visit, you can use the Smartify app app with your smartphone or tablet camera to “scan” the artworks in The Great Tradition and discover the stories behind them.
Look out for Mary Beard’s mythology trail in Smartify too: the historian tells the stories behind key classical works around the RA. Works included in the trail are marked on labels on the walls.
Smartify is available to download for free through the Android and Apple app stores.
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Donate to the RA
The RA is a charity, run by artists and funded by art-lovers. Your donation supports our future, to continue to create, debate and exhibit great works of art and to champion art and artists.
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