Summer in the City: 250 Years of Art at the RA

It's not just about the art, it's about the event, the occasion. Seeing, yes, but being seen is perhaps for some just as important. That's clear right from the start of The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

There are lots of reasons for visiting this show: It's an enlightening history of a great British institution; it offers a potted run-through of 2 1/2 centuries of British art (admittedly, minus a couple of big names); and astonishingly, while the 250th Summer Exhibition itself elsewhere in the RA was drawing big crowds, this 10-room display was surprisingly empty, at least when we went, giving plenty of space for contemplation and enjoyment.

And what you see first is the Summer Exhibition summed up by William Powell Frith, that great Victorian painter of crowd scenes, in A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. What a line-up of distinguished gallery-goers: William Gladstone, Anthony Trollope, Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry. That's Oscar Wilde centre-right, surrounded by a group looking up to him rather than admiring the works on the walls.

There are more splendidly clad art-lovers in Richard Earlom's mezzotint from the earliest years, The Exhibition at the Royal Academy in Pall Mall in 1771. But there's also a weary boy sitting slumped on the bench amid the crowd. Three decades on, Thomas Rowlandson found some visitors were more voyeurs than connoisseurs as ladies in billowing frocks lost their footing on The Exhibition Stare-Case, Somerset House, a reference to one of the show's previous venues.

The great portraitists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are the initial stars: Joshua Reynolds, the RA's first president, Thomas Gainsborough with Elizabeth and Mary Linley, and Thomas Lawrence. But the 1800s also saw the rise of British genre painting, and David Wilkie's Village Politicians became the most talked-about picture of 1806. His depiction of the arrival of news of victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Despatch, was such a sensation at the 1822 Summer Exhibition that the RA had to put a bar around the painting to stop people from touching it.

But the early 19th century was also a great age of British landscape painting. JMW Turner's Calais Sands at Low Water: Poissards Collecting Bait must be the pride of Bury Art Museum with its extraordinary sunset. Hung nearby is John Constable's Leaping Horse. Turner had the sun, but Constable had the clouds.

The Summer Exhibition was shaken up in 1849 with the arrival of the Pre-Raphaelites, challenging the accepted conventions of academic painting, and upsetting the critics. It was John Everett Millais' Isabella that was in the vanguard of the assault with its precision of detail and intense colouring. Look in the bottom right-hand corner and you can see the initials of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood purporting to be part of the carving on the bench on which Isabella is sitting.

It was in the second half of the 19th century that the Summer Exhibition was at the height of its popularity, attracting 350,000 visitors a year. Some of the biggest crowd-pleasers are on display here again, including another Frith, Ramsgate Sands, which had to be roped off to protect it from the public in 1854. Twenty years later, Elizabeth Butler's The Roll Call, depicting an exhausted battalion in the Crimean War, had a policeman stationed by it to hold back the masses.

Two significant portraits take us into the modern era. John Singer Sargent's Henry James was attacked by a suffragette with a meat cleaver in 1914. But Wyndham Lewis's depiction of TS Eliot was too avant-garde for the Academy and was rejected in 1938, leading Augustus John to resign from the RA in disgust.

The Summer Exhibition was seen by some as an anachronism after World War II, with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Francis Bacon among those refusing to submit work. Peter Blake did, though, and his Toy Shop was on display in 1965. On show in the final room are David Hockney, Tracey Emin and Michael Craig-Martin's Reconstructing Seurat (Orange). 

It's a very satisfying show, but a very calm experience compared with the controlled chaos that is the Summer Exhibition itself. More than 1,300 densely packed artworks produce what coordinator Grayson Perry describes as "sensory overload".

With Perry in charge, humour and politics play a big role, particularly in the bright yellow-walled gallery where he's overseen the hang. Portrait of Nigel Farage, anyone? Upstairs, you can see Perry's own Selfie with Political Causes. 

This year's most memorable artwork? It might just be Debbie Lawson's Red Bear. Kitsch or just high-impact? Decide for yourself.

Practicalities

The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition is on at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly in central London every day until August 19 from 1000 to 1800, with late opening on Fridays until 2200. Full-price tickets are £16, including a Gift Aid donation. You can book tickets online here. Tickets for the Summer Exhibition itself cost £18 and are bookable here. The RA has also just announced a special offer: Buy a ticket for the Summer Exhibition and pay just £5 to see The Great Spectacle. The Academy is a few minutes' walk from Green Park and Piccadilly Circus Tube stations.

Images

William Powell Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881, 1883. A Pope Family Trust, courtesy Martin Beisly
John Constable, The Leaping Horse, 1825. (c) Royal Academy of Arts, London; Photographer: John Hammond
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1849. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery
Michael Craig-Martin, Reconstructing Seurat (Orange), 2004. (c) Michael Craig-Martin. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
Grayson Perry, Selfie with Political Causes. The artist and Paragon/Contemporary Editions Ltd.