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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![John Flaxman RA, Scylla]()
Storylines: John Flaxman’s illustrations to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
The Cabinet, 10th August 2019 – 5th January 2020
This display features John Flaxman RA’s original drawings for his illustrations to Homer’s classical epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey from the RA Collection. When engraved and published at the end of the 18th century, Flaxman’s ‘outlines’ made him famous throughout Europe.
His sparing, linear style and striking compositions proved highly influential for generations of artists as well as in the development of book illustration, graphic novels and cartoons.
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Gallery
![Angelica Kauffman RA, Design]()
![Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, Self-portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, PRA]()
![Mary Moser RA, Spring]()
![J.M.W. Turner RA, Dolbadern Castle, North Wales]()
![, Cast of Belvedere Torso]()
![Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA, Satan summoning his Legions]()
![Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John, known as the Taddei Tondo]()
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John, known as the Taddei Tondo, c.1504–05.
![Giampietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, The Last Supper]()
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![Angelica Kauffman RA, Design (detail)]()
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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![Smartify in use in the Collection Gallery]()
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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![Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait Reflection, Fragment (detail)]()
The self-portrait: historical highlights
16 Sep – 18 Nov 2019
Throughout art history, self-portraits have been used as self-promotion, to immortalise the sitter, as an exploration of identity, emotion and ideas. A self-portrait is a public display of the artist’s innermost self, both intensely private and yet their chosen record for posterity.
In this 10-week lecture series you’ll explore the medium of self-portraiture and how artists chose to depict themselves throughout art history.
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Large-print guide
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Start exploring the RA Collection
read more- Explore art works, paint-smeared palettes, scribbled letters and more...
- Artists and architects have run the RA for 250 years.
Our Collection is a record of them.