Papers relating to the Royal Scottish Academy Life School

• Reference:GB 1716 RSA1/10/8

• Scope and Content

  Attendance registers signed by the attending students on a class by class basis. The register of models is sadly wanting though the names of some of these are known from the Voucher Collection. Annual Reports contain summaries of the Annual Reports by the Visitors (tutors) to the Life School. The Fine Art Collection contains examples of work carried out in the Life School by some students.

• Administrative / Biographical History

  One of the founding aims of the Scottish Academy in 1826 was the provision of a sustainable teaching framework for future generations of Scottish Artists. By 1830 the only serious competition in Edinburgh (indeed in Scotland) was the Trustees’ Academy operating out of the Royal Institution Building by the Trustees of the Board of Manufactures, which had been originally founded in 1760. Its remit was however more to prepare artists for work in the manufacturing industries than the training of fine artists per se. Additional provision was provided more haphazardly and less sustainably by any number of artists who provided private tuition. The Trustees Academy’s Life Class opened in 1830, the year after the Royal Institution had opened its own venture in this field. The RSA opened its own Life School in the RI building, its access seriously hampered by the dictatorial regulations imposed by the building’s owners, the Board of Manufactures. The venture lasted a mere 9 weeks in the first half of 1836. The concept was reinforced in the Academy’s Royal Charter of 1838 and two years later, in 1840, The Academy’s Life School was re-opened in new rented premises at West Register Street. There it remained until the Autumn of 1846, at which time the Academy and the Royal Institution were in dispute over access to rooms by the RSA in the RI, when it moved to 33 Abercrombie Place, the former studio of Thomas Duncan RSA, and owned since Duncan’s death in 1845 by John Syme RSA who leased the rooms to the Academy. The School remained at Abercrombie Place until the session of 1853. Following the occupancy of the shared RSA/NGS building on the Mound (the present-day National Gallery of Scotland) by the NGS in 1858 (the RSA had moved in in 1855) the RSA life School was recommenced there. The Billet book of 1886-90 contains copies of printed Letters and Statements between the Academy and the Board of Manufactures which sought to establish its own Life School (1886, and 1889) and ran until the Academy was moved out to the refurbished RI building next door in 1911, by which date the Edinburgh College of Art had been founded and effectively taken over the role of formal art education in the capital. The Life Class was known by a range of epithets, and was subject to a set of printed laws. The teaching was undertaken by a team of four ‘Visitors,’ themselves elected members of the Academy. The Models were hired by the Visitors who paid them from central RSA Funds. The Voucher Collection holds these payment slips, some of which give the actual names of these models; both male and female. Whilst the Registers of students attending have largely survived, RSA Council Minutes also reveal that there was a Register of Models kept, but this valuable little book has long since disappeared. The Life School has been most thoroughly covered in ‘Tradition, Evolution, Opportunism: The Role of the Royal Scottish Academy in Art Education 1826-1910’ by Joanna Soden as her Phd Thesis (Aberdeen University, 2006), 2 vols, copy in RSA Library. The names of models recorded on vouchers have been included in the Excel spreadsheet of RSA Staff compiled by R H Rodger, some of whom were engaged also as Models at the Trustees Academy; vide Appendix V of Victoria Irvine’s University of Glasgow Phd Thesis (2015) The Development of the use of models in Scottish Art, c.1800-1900, with special reference to painting and the Trustees’ Academy. The Academy also holds a copy of the Phd Thesis of Dr Joanna Soden HRSA, the Academy’s first professionally trained Curators; Tradition, Evolution, Opportunism. The Role of the Royal Scottish Academy in Art Education 1826-1910. (Aberdeen University, 2006)]