You can search a selection of the RA’s Collection of works of art here. Currently only works with images are displayed but each month new items are added.
Many of our works of art are by Royal Academicians and range in date from the foundation of the institution in 1768 to the present day. Other works relate to the teaching of students in the Royal Academy Schools and include prints from the Renaissance onwards, plaster casts of Antique sculpture, copies of Old Master paintings and the only marble by Michelangelo in the UK.
This collection consists of 19th and 20th-century photographs of Academicians, landscapes, architecture and works of art. Holdings include early portraits by William Lake Price dating from the 1850s, portraits by David Wilkie Wynfield and Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion: An Electrophotographic investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement 1872–1885.
Diploma Works are works of art presented by artists upon their election as Member of the Royal Academy. This significant collection of works dates from the 18th century to the present day and includes paintings by Fuseli, Turner, Constable, Raeburn, Millais, Sargent, Spencer and Hockney; sculptures by Flaxman, Gibson, Paolozzi, Frink and Flanagan; and architectural drawings by Soane, Barry, Scott, Waterhouse, Lutyens, Rogers and St. John Wilson. Highlights from the collection can be seen on free tours of the John Madejski Fine Rooms.
This collection brings together a wide range of materials for teaching artists and include: anatomical drawings for Cheselden’s Osteographia, George Stubbs’ Anatomy of the Horse; life drawings by William Mulready, Lord Leighton and G.F. Watts; engravings by and after Old Masters such as Rubens, Van Dyck and Goya; plaster casts after the antique and écorché casts from dissected bodies; and copies after Old Masters including 16th-century copies of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s Leda and the Swan.
The collection of portraits of Members of the Royal Academy include many iconic images of British artists including self-portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as significant representations of artists such as Constable, Millais, Alma Tadema and Nolan. There is also an important collection of photographs of Victorian artists by David Wilkie Wynfield.
Significant collections of drawings and sketchbooks by British artists working from the mid-18th century to the present day are held in the Library Print Room. It also contains a large collection of engravings after the Old Masters, reproductive prints after all the leading British artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and a growing collection of original prints by current Members of the Academy including Tom Phillips, Jennifer Dickson and Norman Ackroyd.
An important element of the collection is its wide range of architectural drawings made by leading British architects. These include important drawings by John Yenn, Thomas Graham Jackson and Richard Norman Shaw as well a large collection of drawings relating to Burlington House, the first neo-Palladian town house in Britain.