Royal Academy of Arts: 250th Anniversary

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to add my voice—a rather different one from those which preceded me—to this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who is assiduous in the way he keeps matters of this kind before us and demands our attention on them. I will certainly end my remarks by wishing the Royal Academy many happy returns, but having heard that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has just come out of hospital, I want to wish him happy returns as well. It is very nice to see him here today.

I do not consider myself a philistine—I have visited galleries in Paris, Haiti, St Petersburg, Washington and I do not know where else—but I have never set foot in the Royal Academy so, as I say, I will express a different point of view. To say something constructive, I glory in the fact that an institution of this kind not only exhibits art—we have heard about the summer exhibition—but works as a true academy to promote the appreciation of art and the practice of creating it. It seems important to note that, as well as painters, it includes sculptors, architects and printmakers among its membership, since art is not just painterly skills.

I wanted to be a little better prepared than the fact I have never been to the Royal Academy would suggest, so I did what modern people do: I went on to the website, and found some one, two or three-minute YouTube pieces. I could give a long list, but I particularly enjoyed the little presentation of the “Oceania” exhibition. I have been to Fiji and the South Pacific and saw a lot of native art in situ there. Those pictures were extraordinary in bringing concepts, shapes, colours, contours and experiences into quite a different configuration, challenging us western people and our rather predictable cultural inclinations. Then there was Klimt and Vienna at the end of the 19th century. What a time in Vienna that was; Klimt in particular captured something of its decadence and aesthetics. That video was just one and a half minutes; I could quite easily dilate for more than 10 minutes on it, but I am sure the Minister would not appreciate me doing so.

Then there was Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites—I am very fond of their work—and a very insightful description of what Pre-Raphaelitism sought to achieve. “America after the Fall”—including the painting of those rather po-faced people with a pitchfork, looking the way many people must have felt in the 1930s—indicated how the rural parts of the United States of America are as primitive now as they were when they came into existence in the 18th century, just a few years after the Royal Academy itself. Then there was the video showing Reynolds and Gainsborough in contradistinction. I will make my debut at the Royal Academy when I go to see Bill Viola and Michelangelo’s “Life Death Rebirth”, which seems to capture something I am interested in.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, mentioned the composition of the first academicians in 1768. At a time when we are thinking of leaving Europe, it is not a bad thing to be reminded of Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, France and Germany, which all contributed to the original membership. How can art be insular? How can art exist in a vacuum? It cannot. The Royal Academy, which is quintessentially British, was set up to show that not only could France have institutions of this kind, but we could. However, by recognising the riches that came from a wider creative body, this was never done in an insular or inward-looking way. Creative activity knows no borders.

Once upon a time, not long before I took on these duties, I had what in a card game would be called a royal flush. Nobody else has ever done it. I preached, week by week, from John Wesley’s pulpit; I had a canon’s stall at St Paul’s Cathedral; and I sat on these red Benches in your Lordships’ House. If the Royal Academy is unique, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, says, then so am I.

Let me indicate for a moment how these three locales in my own personal history threw up an awareness of the Royal Academy, which I admit I have never visited. The architect who built Wesley’s Chapel was George Dance the Younger. He was one of the original 40 members in 1768. Is that not something? From my bedroom window on City Road, when the leaves—as now—were off the trees, I could just see the grave of William Blake. I am a poetry man—words are my metier—but Blake was an artist too, and a considerable number of his pieces are in the possession of the Royal Academy. He did all of his training—1779 to 1785—at the Royal Academy. I take great delight in that, as well as in his riposte to Joshua Reynolds, who has been highly spoken of by others but who did not command that degree of respect from William Blake. Reynolds wrote:

“The disposition to abstractions, to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind”,


to which Blake responded:

“To generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit”.


I go with Blake on that one.

Also at Wesley’s Chapel we have all the stained-glass windows and the finest collection of paintings by Frank Salisbury. He is now out of fashion, but he painted 25 portraits of the House of Windsor, more portraits of Winston Churchill than any other artist, the first portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and endless numbers of American presidents vying to get into the same kind of frame as our royal family. Frank Salisbury was a student at the Royal Academy. I have had occasion to know and deal with his family. That is Wesley’s Chapel and the Royal Academy.

As for St Paul’s Cathedral, when sitting there listening to Anglican sermons—which I can tell you are not usually as vigorous as Methodist ones—I have had occasion to look around to be inspired by what I see around me. For example, the spandrels of the four evangelists painted by royal academician George Frederic Watts were quite splendid up there, reminding me that, whatever the sermon is doing with the scriptures, the artist has probably got it more accurately and inspiringly. Watts said:

“I paint ideas, not things”.


Then there are those three bowls in the eastern end of St Paul’s Cathedral; the vaults over the quire by William Blake Richmond, again of the Royal Academy; and Byzantine-style mosaics, pieces of glass set not flat on each other but rigorously against each other to catch the light, rough and sparkling—they are truly remarkable, 12 tonnes of cement and 6,750,000 little tesserae of glass. Think of that—we could rather do with that when refurbishing this place. Then there are the red Benches. Sir Charles Barry had shown his paintings in the summer exhibition while still a teenager, and had a great affection for the place for ever after.

The Royal Academy is undoubtedly a place of great distinction, and a great national monument. It is something of which we should all be proud, and anyone who has never set foot in it should be thoroughly ashamed of himself, as indeed I am right now. But, having wished the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, a happy return—it is good to see him back—I want to ask the Government one searching question, which is in the Motion we are supposed be debating: what plans do the Government have to celebrate the 250th anniversary? I am waiting for it. To the Royal Academy I say: ad multos annos. Enjoy yourselves for another quarter of a millennium.