Royal Academy of Arts

The Royal Academy's holdings are shaped by how the institution has always fed them: not by state purchase or bequest alone, but by the Diploma Works every Royal Academician has been required to give on election since 1768, an unbroken run of paintings, sculpture and architectural drawings that amounts to a self-portrait of British art from Reynolds and Gainsborough to Hockney, Paolozzi and Shonibare. Around that core sit a Teaching Collection built to train the Royal Academy Schools' own students, an important collection of portraits of Members, one of Britain's oldest fine art libraries and an archive documenting the institution's own activities since 1760. Set against this largely British, largely post-1768 material, the Academy holds one major work of Continental Renaissance sculpture, Michelangelo's Taddei Tondo, the only marble by Michelangelo in a UK collection, which arrived by private bequest rather than through the Diploma system.

The Royal Academy of Arts occupies Burlington House, a palazzo on Piccadilly that began as a townhouse for the Earls of Burlington in the second half of the seventeenth century and was remodelled into its present Palladian form for the 3rd Earl in the 1710s and 1720s. The government bought the house and its garden in 1854, and over the following two decades it was reworked again, with new ranges added around a courtyard to hold a cluster of learned societies. The Royal Academy was not the house's first tenant: it had rented rooms in Pall Mall from its founding, then a purpose-built gallery at Old Somerset House designed by its own first Treasurer, Sir William Chambers, then premises shared with the newly founded National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Space at Trafalgar Square ran short, and in 1867 the Academy moved into Burlington House, where it remains. Its President at the time, Francis Grant, negotiated an annual rent of one pound for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, a lease that still runs.

The building has been added to twice in ways that shape a visit today. In 1991 the Academy opened the Sackler Wing of Galleries, designed by the Royal Academicians Norman Foster and Spencer de Grey, replacing the Victorian Diploma Galleries with a glass staircase and a light-filled atrium that Foster has said helped set the template for later projects such as the Great Court at the British Museum. In 2001 the Academy bought 6 Burlington Gardens, a listed building on the block behind Burlington House, and from 2008 worked with David Chipperfield Architects on a decade-long masterplan, RA250, to join the two buildings for the first time and open new space for art, architecture, lectures and debate. The joined campus opened on 19 May 2018, months ahead of the Academy's 250th anniversary. That project is not finished: the Collection Gallery inside 6 Burlington Gardens closed to the public again from 27 October 2026 for a further expansion, with a return expected in early 2027, while the historic Burlington House side keeps its usual hours throughout.

The Royal Academy is not a branch of the state and not, despite the similarity of name, the same institution as the Royal Academy of Music or the Royal Academy of Engineering, nor the Royal Society, a separate scientific body that shares the Burlington House courtyard as a fellow society but keeps no art collection. It was founded on 10 December 1768, when a petition of thirty-six painters, sculptors and architects led by Chambers asked George III for permission to establish a society for promoting the arts of design, with an annual public exhibition and a school attached. The King agreed the same winter. At the first General Assembly four days later, Sir Joshua Reynolds was elected President, George Michael Moser became the first Keeper, responsible for the Schools, and Francis Milner Newton was appointed Secretary. The Academy has run itself this way ever since: an independent, self-governing body of practising artists and architects, the Royal Academicians, who elect their own new Members, teach in their own free art school, and fund the institution chiefly through ticket sales, membership and its shop rather than a government grant of the kind that supports the National Gallery a few streets away.

The thirty-six founders included two women, Mary Moser and the Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman, but the Academy's record on admitting more is a chequered one. In 1879 its Council concluded, reading the 1768 Instrument of Foundation again, that nothing in it in fact barred women, and passed a resolution making them eligible, though on restricted terms; even so, no further woman was elected a full Academician until Laura Knight in 1936, a gap of a hundred and sixty-eight years. In 1913 suffragettes turned the galleries themselves into a stage for protest: one slashed John Singer Sargent's portrait of the novelist Henry James, another attacked a painting by George Clausen, and a third tried to start a fire in the toilets.

A visitor entering from Piccadilly reaches the Main Galleries and the Sackler Wing, where the Academy's ticketed loan exhibitions run; at the time of this research the show on view was Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, bringing together more than a hundred works by the Victorian fairy painter across the Sackler Wing's rooms. Free to everyone and reached from the same entrance are the John Madejski Fine Rooms, the Academy's own working rooms above the entrance hall, decorated to a scheme laid out around 1710 for Lady Juliana, Dowager Countess of Burlington, and still used for Academy business: the General Assembly Room, where Royal Academicians meet, was once the house's banqueting room. From December 2025 the Fine Rooms are standing in as the public collection display while the purpose-built Collection Gallery in 6 Burlington Gardens undergoes a further expansion and stays closed until early 2027.

Outside the galleries proper, the Annenberg Courtyard forms the Academy's forecourt off Piccadilly, arrived at through an archway, and has for years carried a changing programme of large outdoor sculpture commissions alongside Alfred Drury's statue of Reynolds. Upstairs and largely out of public view, the Royal Academy Schools continue to train postgraduate art students for free inside the same building where they have taught, without interruption, since 1768, making them Britain's oldest art school.

Two things distinguish the Academy's own collection from an ordinary museum's. The first is the Summer Exhibition, held every year without a break, including through both World Wars, since 1769, and the world's oldest open-submission art exhibition: anyone can enter a work, a rotating committee of Academicians selects and hangs the show over an eight-day hang, and the Academy takes a thirty-five per cent commission on anything sold, with the proceeds going to the RA Schools. Around two-thirds of exhibited works are typically by artists who are not Academicians at all, hung alongside Members and Honorary Academicians such as David Hockney, Tracey Emin and Ed Ruscha in recent years. It ends each year on Sanctioning Day, after which no changes can be made, and Non-Member's Varnishing Day, when a procession of artists led by a steel band still makes its way down Piccadilly.

The second is the Diploma Collection: every artist and architect elected a Royal Academician since 1768 has presented one work on election, an unbroken run that has produced paintings by Turner, John Constable, John Everett Millais, John Singer Sargent, Stanley Spencer and David Hockney; sculpture by John Flaxman, John Gibson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink and Yinka Shonibare; and architectural drawings by John Soane, Edwin Lutyens, Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye. Set against this largely British record is the Academy's one major work of Continental Renaissance sculpture, Michelangelo's marble Taddei Tondo, bought to England in 1822 and given to the Academy in 1829, the only marble carved by Michelangelo held anywhere in the United Kingdom. A near full-size sixteenth-century copy of Leonardo's Last Supper, made for teaching rather than display, sits in the same Teaching Collection that also holds George Stubbs's anatomical studies and casts from the antique.

The Academy's own exhibition history has produced real controversy more than once. Its 1930 Italian Art show, which brought Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Raphael's La Donna Velata and Donatello's David to Burlington House, was visited by Mussolini and used to further the cause of Fascism in Britain, a use the Academy did not control but that historians still cite against the show. In September 1997, Sensation, drawn from Charles Saatchi's collection, opened to a media storm over deliberately shocking exhibits, most notoriously Marcus Harvey's portrait of the child murderer Myra Hindley built from a child's handprint stencil; several Academicians resigned over the show, though most later returned, and more than three hundred thousand visitors came to see it, several of the artists involved going on to become Academicians themselves.

Current visitor opinion, read on Tripadvisor on 18 September 2026 from 2,273 ratings averaging 4.3 out of 5, consistently praises the free Fine Rooms, the Annenberg Courtyard and the range of the loan programme, and just as consistently divides over the Summer Exhibition, which some visitors call a uniquely democratic exhibition and others call inconsistent in quality and overpriced; specific and recent complaints cover reflective glazing that obscures paintings in the Fine Rooms and lapses in cafe hygiene and service, alongside at least one detailed account of staff going well beyond what was asked of them during a medical emergency on site. Critical reception of individual shows runs from warm to sharply divided: reviewing the 2026 Rose Wylie retrospective for theartsdesk, Sarah Kent gave the show five stars and called Wylie's paintings a blast of fresh air, while noting in the same review that the Academy's own curators had tried to tame her rebellious spirit by making her paradoxical images seem sensible, a mild but real institutional criticism embedded inside an otherwise enthusiastic notice.

Visitors consistently rate the free permanent displays, the historic interiors and the Annenberg Courtyard as the best reasons to visit even without buying a ticket, and describe staff as helpful, including in a serious account of a medical emergency handled with care. Opinion splits hardest over the annual open-submission Summer Exhibition, which some find a democratic celebration of working artists and others find inconsistent in quality and overpriced for what is on the walls. A recurring practical complaint is glare from glazing over paintings in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, and there are isolated but sharp complaints about cafe service and hygiene.