The Great Spectacle

The Great Spectacle

Director of Studies Mark Hallett invites PMC Notes readers to see The Great Spectacle exhibition at the Royal Academy this summer.

Sometimes, you can really tell when artists have enjoyed themselves. This must have been the case, surely, when Thomas Rowlandson produced the image that adorns the cover of this issue of PMC Notes. In this typically lively and deftly drawn work, which he made sometime around 1815, the famous satirist wryly lampoons a clutch of visitors to the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition at Somerset House. The Academy’s exhibition, packed to the rafters with paintings, sculptures, and drawings, and thronged with people, was the central event of the British art world in his period, and was lauded by its admirers as a symbol of Britain’s artistic and cultural sophistication. Rowlandson takes a very different, far more mischievous view of the exhibition, and, more particularly, of its visitors, whom he transforms into a comic assembly: we see, amongst others, a grotesquely corpulent gentleman, a red-faced cleric, stooping connoisseurs (their bottoms perfectly in sync), an overdressed matron and two beautiful young women, the latter of whom smile, pink-cheeked, as they look at a wall of paintings adorned with a female nude. It is easy to imagine that Rowlandson had a smile on his face as he drew: look, for instance, at the way he uses these visitors’ mouths and jaws to suggest their babbling conversation and ignorant gawping—this is an image that revels in lolling and puckered lips, slack and darting tongues, and a parade of lurching and retreating chins.

Detail of Thomas Rowlandson, Viewing at the Royal Academy, ca. 1815, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Rowlandson’s cheerful satire, which is owned by the Yale Center for British Art, is one of the many works that will feature in The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, which opens at the Royal Academy in June. The show, which I have had the pleasure of co-curating with my colleague Sarah Turner, and on which we have worked closely with other colleagues here at the PMC and at the RA—most especially, Jessica Feather, Per Rumberg and Anna Testar—is designed to offer a stimulating, scholarly, and, we hope, surprising introduction to the history of the Royal Academy’s remarkably long-lasting display, which has taken place every year since 1769. Timed to coincide with this year’s Summer Exhibition, and to help celebrate the Academy’s 250th anniversary, The Great Spectacle will include over eighty paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the first such exhibition right through to the present day, together with a rich variety of contextual materials, including catalogues, tickets, illustrated guides, photographs, and exhibition posters. All have been chosen to tell a particular story about the summer exhibition, and include works by such artists as Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann, Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Sir Frederic Leighton, John Singer Sargent, Laura Knight, Peter Blake, Sandra Blow, Tracey Emin, Zaha Hadid, Sir Michael Craig-Martin, David Hockney and Wolfgang Tillmans, amongst many others. We think this is a pretty interesting line-up, as I hope will all those who decide to make the journey to The Great Spectacle this summer. Please come. As far as I know, there will be no satirists lurking in the corners of our exhibition rooms with pens or brushes in hand; and in any case, I am sure that even Rowlandson would find it difficult to picture the readers of PMC Notes as either ungraceful or unsophisticated.