The RA's Summer Exhibition is a lightning rod for artistic arguments
The most famous exhibition in the world has been a magnet for controversy ever since its inception.
No show compares to the Royal Academy’s (RA) Summer Exhibition. Its uniqueness derives from history and format: select public submissions are displayed together with works by invited artists, Royal and Honorary Academicians, in the world’s largest survey of contemporary art and architecture.
Arty altercations
- In 1784, Thomas Gainsborough withdrew all of his works after the hanging committee refused to display The Three Eldest Princesses where he wanted. He never exhibited at the RA again
- In the mid 19th century, critics began to fret about what was appearing in what one commentator called 'the most public rooms in England'. Debates about radical shifts in artistic style and the loss of high moral tone became a recurring feature of Summer Exhibition commentary
- With thousands of entries, mishaps can happen. In 2006, artist David Hensel submitted a laughing-head sculpture and its accompanying plinth. The two were entered separately and judged accordingly — with the result that the head was rejected and the plinth accepted
- The majority of the tens of thousands of works submitted each year are rejected — including a 2018 work by Banksy which was put forward under the name 'Bryan S. Gaakman'. The work was subsequently accepted when the artist's identity became known, throwing up questions about the influence of celebrity
Perhaps because of this, it has been a lightning rod for artistic rows almost continuously since it began and many of its biggest controversies have centred on who gets in and where they are hung.
It all started in 1768, when 34 artists and architects, including Reynolds, Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, obtained George III’s permission to establish the RA and hold an annual exhibition. The first show took place a year later, featuring 136 works (today, there are about 1,200).
Artists used to apply the final touches to their paintings on Varnishing Day. In 1832, Constable was busy perfecting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge when Turner came in and realised that his seascape, Helvoetsluys, didn’t stand out compared with his rival’s work — so he added a bright red buoy to it. When he saw it, a dejected Constable said: 'He has been here and fired a gun.'
Today, members of the public can submit up to two works for consideration. The final selection is made in the gallery in an ‘eight-day hang’, during which committee members are fortified by swigs of a legendary ‘beef’ tea, the recipe for which is secret.
For a picture that sent shockwaves through late-18th-century Britain, The Conjuror, by Nathaniel Hone the Elder (1718–84), looks innocuous enough.
Clad in rich red robes, an ancient wizard, luxuriant beard streaming past his neck to skim the top of his chest, summons with his wand a collection of Old Master prints to make new paintings.
The artist’s contemporaries, however, recognised in the figure the president of the RA, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in the scene a satire of the great artist’s tendency to ‘borrow’ extensively from Renaissance works.
Nonetheless, The Conjuror, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, was accepted for the RA exhibition — until Angelica Kauffman saw herself in the woman dancing naked in the background, since removed, but still visible in a sketch belonging to Tate.
Hone wrote to her to rebut the accusation: ‘To convince you, madam, that your figure in that composition was the farthest from my thoughts, I now declare I never at any time saw your works but with the greatest pleasure, and that respect due to a lady whom I esteem as the first of her sex in painting, and amongst the loveliest of women in person’ — and offered to paint over the figure.
Kauffman remained unappeased and threatened to pull out all her pictures if Hone’s painting was shown, which in turn led the RA Council to turn it down. This, however, incensed the artist, who decided to stage a solo exhibition of his works in another gallery, giving The Conjuror pride of place and complaining in an affidavit that neither RA treasurer Sir William Chambers nor three other grandees had taken into account his ‘most explicit declaration’ that he had ‘never introduced, or intended to introduce, any figure reflecting on Mrs. Angelica Kaufmann’.
Despite all this, a year later the furore had already died down: Hone returned to exhibit at the RA in the summer of 1776 and continued to do so until his death.
What to look out for at this year's Summer Exhibition
Sir Grayson Perry at the Summer Exhibition Preview Party on June 10, 2026.
- Sir Grayson Perry was elected a Royal Academician in 2011. This year he's exhibiting Behold Humanity!, a large-scale tapestry that reveals what the artist thinks about AI (spoiler alert: it's not particularly positive)
- Honorary Royal Academician Marina Abramović's The Kitchen VIII from her photographic series 'The Kitchen, Homage to Saint Therese' is also on display. The photographs — which were staged in an abandoned kitchen space in Spain — pay tribute to Saint Therese of Ávila, a mystic renowned for her intense spiritual experiences and levitation episodes often associated with domestic and kitchen spaces
- When Country Life put a cat on its front cover for only the second time in its 130-year-long history, we didn't think the RA would follow suit with a dedicated feline display, but here we all are. The standout is Jill Feld’s frantic black cat painting
The RA's Summer Exhibition is open until August 23. Visit their website for more information and to book.
