compiled by Jane Stroud
John Everett Millais Isabella, 1849, oil on canvas, 40½×56¼in (103×142.8cm)
The world’s longest running annual exhibition of contemporary art, The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition has been held in London every year, without exception, since 1769. The story of this historic show is brought to life in a special exhibition to mark its 250th anniversary. The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition will include over 80 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints spanning the past 250 years by such great names as Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, Singer Sargent, Blake and Hockney. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition focuses on significant moments within the art world as well as on pictures that experienced particular success or failure on the crowded walls of the Royal Academy. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the author Henry James, for example, was famously slashed with a meat cleaver by the suffragette, Mary Wood in the Summer Exhibition of 1914. Mary’s protest against the lack of political representation for women led her to attack the Royal Academy and its association with an artistic male elite. There is also an opportunity to see Sir Winston Churchill’s Winter Sunshine, Chartwell, submitted in 1947 under the pseudonym David Winter.