Tour: Britain's Royal Academy of Art in the Late 1700s and Early 1800s

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Overview

On 2 January 1769, under the patronage of King George III, the Royal Academy met for its first session. The official title of this elite institution is "Royal Academy in London for the Purpose of Cultivating and Improving the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture," but artists, then and now, simply call it "The R.A." The painters among the R.A.'s founding members were its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds; the portraitist Thomas Gainsborough; the landscapist Richard Wilson; and Benjamin West, a colonial American who became president upon Reynolds' death in 1792.

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Captions

1.
1	John Crome, Moonlight on the Yare, c. 1816/1817
2	Thomas Gainsborough, Seashore with Fishermen, c. 1781/1782
3	Thomas Gainsborough, Mountain Landscape with Bridge, c. 1783/1784
4	Thomas Gainsborough, Miss Catherine Tatton, 1786
5	Sir Henry Raeburn, David Anderson, 1790
6	Sir Henry Raeburn, Miss Eleanor Urquhart, c. 1793
2.
7	Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Caroline Howard, 1778
8	George Romney, Mrs. Alexander Blair, 1787-1789