Royal Academy of Arts

Stand for a moment just inside the archway from Piccadilly. The roar of buses and taxis drops away behind you, and the air in the courtyard feels a little cooler and quieter. Pale stone walls rise on every side. Your footsteps sound sharper here, bouncing off the old facades. In the middle of the courtyard, a bronze figure in a long coat holds a brush and palette. This is the Royal Academy of Arts, and that figure is the man who led it first.

The bronze shows Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter who became the Academy's first president. The institution was founded in 1768 under King George the Third. Its founders had a simple but bold idea. Britain had no proper national academy for artists, unlike Paris or Rome. So a group of painters, sculptors and architects decided to create one. It would train young artists, and it would hold a public exhibition every year. Both of those promises are still kept today.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. The Academy has always been run by artists themselves, not by the state and not by collectors. Its members are called Royal Academicians, and they elect each other. Among the founding members were two women — the painter Angelica Kauffman and the flower painter Mary Moser. That was unusual for the eighteenth century. After them, however, it took a very long time before another woman became a full Academician.

The building around you is called Burlington House. It began life in the late seventeenth century as a private mansion for an aristocratic family. In the early eighteenth century, the third Earl of Burlington remodelled it in the Palladian style. Palladian means a calm, symmetrical design based on the work of Andrea Palladio, an Italian architect of the sixteenth century. Look at the even rows of windows and the balanced lines. That restraint was the whole point.

The Academy did not start here. In its early decades it worked from rooms elsewhere in London, including Somerset House beside the Thames, and later shared space with the National Gallery. It moved to Burlington House in the second half of the nineteenth century. The government also gave space around this courtyard to several learned societies. So as you turn in a slow circle, you are not only looking at an art academy. You are looking at a small village of British science and scholarship.

This is the second surprise. The doors around the courtyard lead to societies devoted to chemistry, geology, astronomy, antiquities and natural history. One of them is the Linnean Society, named after the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. In 1858, at a meeting of that society in this building, papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection were read aloud. Very few people in the room understood what they had just heard. One of the great ideas in science was first presented a few steps from where you stand.

Now turn back to the art. The Academy's most famous tradition is the Summer Exhibition. It has been held every year since 1769, which makes it one of the longest-running art shows anywhere. The rules are unusual. Almost anyone can submit a work — a famous Academician or a complete unknown. A committee chooses the pieces, and thousands of works fill the galleries, often hung close together from floor to ceiling. Most of them are for sale.

The Summer Exhibition has produced some good stories. Before the show opened, artists were traditionally allowed into the galleries for so-called varnishing days, to make final touches to their pictures on the wall. According to a well-known account from the 1830s, the painter J. M. W. Turner saw his sea painting hanging next to a bright canvas by his rival John Constable. Turner added a single small red mark to his own grey sea, and then walked away. Constable reportedly said that Turner had fired a gun.

Inside, the galleries change with each season's exhibitions, but the Academy also holds a permanent collection. When artists are elected as Academicians, they give the Academy a work, called a diploma work. Over more than two centuries, this has built up a collection that shows how British art changed. You can trace the shift from grand portraits and history paintings toward landscape, modernism and the very contemporary. The collection is a record of what artists themselves valued.

One object in that collection deserves a special pause. It is a round marble relief by Michelangelo, known as the Taddei Tondo. It shows the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ and the young Saint John. Parts of the marble are left unfinished, and you can still see the marks of the sculptor's chisel. It is the only marble sculpture by Michelangelo in Britain. Standing close to it, you see how the figures seem to come out of rough stone.

The Academy also contains the Royal Academy Schools, which trace their history back to the founding in 1768. They are the oldest art school in Britain. Over the years, many well-known British artists trained here, Turner and Constable among them. The Schools still run today, with a small number of students working in studios inside the building. So this is not only a place to look at art. It is a working place where art is being made right now.

In more recent years, the Academy expanded behind Burlington House into a second building facing Burlington Gardens. That building once housed university offices and later a museum. For the Academy's 250th anniversary in 2018, architect David Chipperfield linked the two sites. The new route lets you walk from Piccadilly straight through to the streets of Mayfair behind. It also opened new galleries, a lecture theatre and spaces where visitors can look into the work of the Schools.

When you step back out into the courtyard, notice how the light falls on the stone. In the morning it is soft and grey. Later in the day, it turns warmer on the upper walls. Then look past the arch toward Piccadilly. The traffic, the shops and the crowds are waiting. Behind you, Reynolds still holds his palette. Artists and scientists have passed through this square for more than two centuries... and today, for a few minutes, you are one of them.