The British Museum and the Royal Academy ; cultural politics and the nation state in the eighteenth century

During the mid-eighteenth century the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts were established, the former by Parliament, the latter by artists under the patronage of the Crown. In their origins and their early development they illustrate and help shape ideas relating to the growth of the notion of Britishness and English national identity. They were the theatres in which ideas about the kind of political nation Britain imagined itself to be were played out between loyalists (supporters of a reformed monarchy, and later known as Tories) and Whigs (on occasion mistrustful of the Crown and jealous of the hard won rights of Parliament). Their foundation is all the more extraordinary because they developed at a time when some powerful politicians regarded national sponsorship and support of the arts with great suspicion. Indeed a strong lobby regarded the arts and culture as something that could only flourish with free enterprise. At the same time their early history illustrates the development of the idea that appreciation of the arts and an understanding of knowledge could and should be moved from the private concerns of the educated, privileged few to the wider public sphere. Though this enthusiasm for the education and edification of the general populace has been over exaggerated and the notion of the public was still a very restricted one, nevertheless these foundations illustrate the growing understanding of the role of the arts and museums in the forging and maintenance of popular support for the nation state and its political construction. This paper seeks to re-examine the origins of these two key national cultural institutions. It considers their political significance and suggests that this has been somewhat downplayed by those who focus on their development within cultural historical contexts. While not dismissing the importance of the international and national cultural arenas in which these institutions were imagined and forged, particularly the role of the Enlightenment, the paper suggests that they can only be fully understood within the context of a nation still exploring and developing a constitutional monarchical system of government. This political system appeared less secure to those for whom the community memories of the Civil Wars of the mid-sixteenth century and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were still important, than it perhaps does to us who can see the progress of monarchical constitutional democracy over the perspective of more than three centuries. For those living in the mid-eighteenth century these conflicts and contested ideas of nationhood were still a significant communal memory, refreshed by the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. Just as the two World Wars have shaped British notions of identity in the twentieth century and continue to do so in the twenty first, so these constitutional struggles between Monarch and Parliament exercised a dominant influence not only how the nation should be governed and by whom but what sort of nation England and latterly Britain should be. Within this context it can be suggested that the role of these institutions in memorializing and reminding people of the struggle for the constitution has been overlooked. This paper also suggests that it is helpful to see Museum & Society, March 2019. 17(1) 66-82 © 2019, Sheila Watson. ISSN 1479-8360 67 Museum & Society, 17 (1) these two institutions not only existing with, and being themselves products of, this shared political inheritance, but also suggests that both affected the other so that a comparison of their early development can provide insights into them both. At the same time this study offers an opportunity to deconstruct some notions of Britishness with which the British Museum, in particular has been associated, and suggest that its political meaning can be found rooted in English as well as British historical traditions.