British Institution - Modern Exhibitions

Modern Exhibitions

The price of admission remained one shilling throughout the life of the Institution. There were some private openings in the evenings, for members and (separately) exhibitors, these being divided into two by splitting the alphabet. The number of modern works exhibited grew within a few years to over 500. The first exhibition contained 257 works (including sculptures and some enamels and miniatures) with a good selection of the leading British artists, including (selecting on their modern rather than contemporary reputations) two Turners, two Stubbs paintings and five enamels, fourteen Benjamin Wests, four Paul Sandby's, two by Thomas Lawrence, one a huge history painting, three Copleys including his Death of Chatham, four James Wards, as well as 24 pictures from the Arabian Nights by Robert Smirke, who was to turn against the Institution. Within a few years the number of works regularly reached over 500, and many had to be rejected. The 1806 receipts for the shilling entries were £534 & 4s implying 10,684 paying visitors above the members and their guests. In 1810 the Institution announced that in its first four years a total of 424 works had been sold, raising £20,900 for the artists (the Institution took no cut of sales); by 1826 this cumulative figure was over £75,000. In 1814 the Emperor of Russia and King of Prussia were among the visitors, apparently without buying.

Perhaps because many large history paintings were submitted, and indeed encouraged by the Institution, the number of works included fell in the late 1810s: in 1818 309 were exhibited and 65 sold, for £2,623, typical for these years, though from 1828 there were usually over 500 until the late 1830s after which numbers in the mid-400s were typical until about 1850, when they rose again. The Institution largely remained faithful to the hierarchy of genres and saw the encouragement of history painting as an aim, especially as opposed to portraits, traditionally the mainstay of the British market. Its exhibitions were by 1850 falling behind developments in British art; few Pre-Raphaelite works were exhibited there, though Ford Madox Brown's oval Hampstead landscape was seen and disliked there by John Ruskin in 1855.