St. Martin's Lane Academy

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The St. Martin's Lane Academy (also called "Second St. Martin's Lane Academy") was a private painting and drawing school founded in 1735 by William Hogarth and his friends from London, with the aim of promoting modern native English art . The artists met regularly at Old Slaughter's, a coffee house on St. Martin's Lane , London , to discuss their new ideas.

precursor

In the early 18th century there was no institution in England like the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris , which promoted French art through regular exhibitions and prizes. Since 1711 there has been only one drawing school on Great Queen Street , directed by Sir Godfrey Kneller , which George Vertue cockily referred to as the "Academy of Painting", but there is no clear historical evidence that this art school really was painted. In 1718 the court painter Sir James Thornhill tried to get Kneller's training center going. But this failed, as did a parallel project by John Vanderbank and Louis Chéron in St. Martin's Lane in the early 1720s (the so-called "first" St. Martin's Lane Academy, which included the young Hogarth among its members) because there were not enough subscribers for the privately financed ventures could be found, so that Thornhill ran a newly opened drawing school from 1724 in his private house in James Street, Covent Garden .

The painting and drawing school founded in 1735

For the second "St.Petersburg", presumably to be rebuilt in 1735 in "Russell's Meeting House", a large former meeting room of the Presbyterians at the west end of Peter's Court. Martin's Lane Academy ”, Hogarth, who studied at Thornhill's drawing school and married the daughter of his trainer in 1729, was able to use the equipment from his father-in-law's training facility after Thornhill's death in 1734. The new art school should be run democratically and financed equally by the members. Hogarth was supported in his project by artists such as John Ellys , Francis Hayman and Hubert-François Gravelot . Drawing "according to nature", ie according to the living human model (and less according to plaster statues as in the traditional continental art academies ), was particularly cultivated. And in order to make the academy more attractive to interested parties, as in the first St. Martin's Lane Academy, female nude models were employed whose poses could be drawn.

In addition to Ellys, Hayman and Gravelot, the members of the St. Martin's Lane Academy also included the French sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac and the young painter Thomas Gainsborough , who was trained by Gravelot, as well as the goldsmith and enameller George Michael Moser and the medalist Richard Yeo , the architect Isaac Ware and the architect and neoclassical architectural theorist James Stuart .

Demise of the democratic art school

After the art school had been operating successfully for almost two decades, the democratically run St. Martin's Lane Academy gradually declined in the 1750s, as more and more London artists advocated a more regulated London art academy based on the continental model, while Hogarth opposed one Resisted for a long time. In the end, however, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768 under the direction of Hogarth's ex-artistic rival Joshua Reynolds .

Remarks

  1. ↑ More on this in three articles by Mark Girouard: English art and the rococo , I – III: Coffee at Slaughter's - Hogarth and his friends - The two worlds of St Martin's Lane ". Published in: Country Life 139 (13. and 27. January and February 3, 1966), pp. 58-61, 188-90 and 224-27.
  2. ↑ See William T. Whitley: Artists and their Friends in England 1700–1799 . London 1928. Volume 1, pp. 17-18.
  3. ↑ See William Sandby: The History of the Royal Academy of Arts from Its Foundation in 1768 . London 1862, p. 21.
  4. ↑ More details from Ronald Paulson: Hogarth . Volume 2. Cambridge 1992, pp. 74-76.