St. Martin's Lane Academy

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The St. Martin's Lane Academy, which was the precursor of the Royal Academy, was organized in 1735 by William Hogarth, from the circle of artists and designers who gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House at the upper end of St. Martin's Lane, London. The artistic set that introduced the Rococo style to England was centered on "Old Slaughter's" and the drawing-classes at the St. Martin's Lane Academy were inextricably linked in the dissemination of new artistic ideas in England in the reigns of George II and George III.

In Britain in the early eighteenth century there was no organised public official patronage of the arts, aside from commissions for specific projects. There was no established body to compare with the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture that Colbert had established in France, and no public exhibition of recent paintings such as the Paris salons, held every other year. The closest approximation to an academic life-drawing class was established by Sir Godfrey Kneller in 1711, and assumed by Sir James Thornhill, his official successor, who conducted life-drawing classes from a room he added to his own house in James Street, Covent Garden, from 1724^[1] until his death in May 1734, but with small success in finding subscribers, his son-in-law William Hogarth recalled; Hogarth attributed its failure in some measure to the rival drawing-academy set up by John Vanderbank. It was Hogarth who established the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1735, removing apparatus from Thornhill's studio, and Hogarth remained its central figure. Hogarth wrote an account of its formation about 1760,^[2] in which he takes credit for the sound democratic principle that all should contribute an equal sum to the Academy's expenses and have an equal vote, "attributing the failure of the previous academies to the leading members having assumed a superiority which their fellow-students could not brook." Thus the Academy abandoned hierarchic seventeenth-century precedents and was formed on the basis of a club.

The painters were themselves reacting against the Italianate Late Baroque manner exemplified by Thornhill himself,^[3] and the designers were finding alternatives to the cool neo-Palladian classicism being espoused in the 1730s by Lord Burlington and William Kent; the rococo artists found patrons, as Mark Girouard first noted, in the circle that formed around Frederick, Prince of Wales in Leicester Square.

The membership of the academy formed from an informal, club-like circle that was in the habit of meeting at Old Slaughter's Coffee House, which had been at 74 and 75, St. Martin's Lane since 1692, when the neighborhood was still distinctly suburban.^[4] It was "Old" Slaughter's Coffee House after 1742, when a new Slaughter's Coffee House opened, at no. 82 (the present site of Westminster County Court).^[5]

Among the members of the St. Martin's Lane Academy were Hubert Gravelot, engraver and book illustrator, François Roubiliac, a French sculptor established in London, Francis Hayman and his pupil, the very young Thomas Gainsborough who was employed by Gravelot, George Michael Moser, aSwiss-born artist and enameller, later first Keeper of the Royal Academy collections, Richard Yeo and Isaac Ware, architect. Desmond Fitz-Gerald notes^[6] that an asterisk in the list of subscribers to Joshua Kirby, Dr Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy (London 1754) identifies members of the St. Martin's Lane Academy; Fitz-Gerald notes as further members the architect James Paine; Charles, son of Henry Cheere, sculptor; and Johann Sebastian Müller, an engraver of Chippendale's Director. An unexpected member of the circle was James Stuart, trained as a painter but familiar as one of the earliest practitioners of Neoclassicism in Europe; that later phase was far in the future when he moved in the Academy's milieu, introduced by the French engravers Louis and Joseph Goupy, both of whom were members.^[7]

The premises of the Academy were a large room in Peter's Court, entered from the Lane through a low vaulted passageway^[8]

George Vertue noted early in 1745 "The Accademy for the study of painting & other artists [sic] is carryd on and conducted by several, Ellis, Hayman, Gravelot, Wills— &c..."" Of these four named by Vertue, the most obscure is James Wills (working c. 1740-1777), later the Rev. James Wills. In 1754 he made a translation of du Fresnoy's stilted and old-fashioned Latin poem on the art of painting, De arte graphica, which did not meet a successful reception.^[9] but which apparently identifies Wills as the "Fresnoy" who published bitterly sarcastic invective at Sir Joshua Reynolds and artists like Zoffany who had left the Society of Artists to join the newly-founded Royal Academy.^[10] His "conversation piece" The Andrews Family (signed "J. Wills pinxit" and dated 1749) is at the Fitzwilliam Museum.^[11] Edward Edwards' continuation of Walpole's Anecdotes of Painters (1808:55) notes that Wills had painted some portraits and historical subjects, "but not meeting much success in his profession he quitted it, and having received a liberal education, took orders. He was for some years curate at Cannons, Middlesex, where the prominent cabinet-maker of St. Martin's Lane William Hallett had built a residence on part of the foundations of the great demolished house. In 1772 the Rev. James Wills was appointed to the living at Canons by Hallett's grandson, the subject, with his wife, of Gainsborough's The Morning Walk (1787).^[12]

Not all the artists in St. Martin's Lane were members of the Academy. Matthew Lock, the draughtsman and engraver who engraved most of the designs for Chippendale's Director, advertised in 1748 that he was offering evening drawing-classes for tradesmen and students in his premises "Facing Old Slaughter's Coffee House".^[13] and Thomas Chippendale, the most famous maker of English rococo furniture, seem never to have joined.^[14]

Other French Protestant emigrés were drawn to the mix of English and foreigners at Slaughter's. Abraham de Moivre, friend of Newton and Halley, eked out a meagre existence as a tutor, spending evening hours at Slaughter's.^[15] at the time chiefly interesting to gamblers seeking to maximize their odds rather than to statisticians. Other intellectuals were drawn to the atmosphere of Slaughter's: Joseph Priestly met in a virtual "Slaughter's Club" with Josiah Wedgwood, Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks.^[16]

The presence of several outstanding cabinetmakers in St. Martin's Lane was influential in translating Rococo designs into furnishings. In December 1753, directly across from Old Slaughter's Thomas Chippendale took a long lease on three houses that served as his premises for the rest of his career.^[17] A chance remark establishes that John Linnell attended life-classes at the St. Martin's Lane Academy,^[18] and William Hallett also had workshops in the Lane.

In the 1760s Old Slaughter's Coffee House was the place where the Italian painter Antonio Zucchi, brought to London by Robert Adam, formed a friendship with the literary intellectual Jean-Paul Marat , "a man of extensive classical learning who continually proposed subjects which he had selected for Zucchi to design", the painter Joseph Farington noted in his diary, after Marat's subesquent revolutionary career had run its course;^[19] Marat came to Zucchi's house "in the most familiar manner, a knife and fork laid for him every day."^[20]

At a later date it was "over a Neck of Veal and Potatoes, at the Old Slaughter Coffee House",^[21] that the liberal scientific Club of Honest Whigs, centered on the figure of Benjamin Franklin was formed.

The artistic circle meeting at Old Slaughter's Coffee House was revived from its obscurity in a series of articles by Mark Girouard.^[22]

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