3-065-936 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, 1874. 'Five years have passed since the Royal Academy Exhibition of each returning May was removed from Trafalgar-square to the new palace of art and science on the site of Burlington House, Piccadilly. The stately saloons - finely proportioned, handsomely decorated, and for the most part, where the pictures are shown, perfectly lighted - are now familiar to everybody, since everybody in the world, within the last five years, has sometimes been in London...It is now a twelvemonth since the facade of the new Royal Academy Building, as designed by Mr. Sidney [sic] Smirke, the architect, was revealed to view by opening the quadrangle in front of it, which is surrounded on three sides by the buildings for several learned societies...these buildings [were] designed by Messrs. Banks and Barry…That elegant mansion [ie Burlington House], constructed about the end of the seventeenth century by Richard Boyle, second Earl of Burlington, has not been so much demolished as transformed; an upper story has been added, to contain the library of the Royal Academy, its diploma pictures and statues, and the Gibson collection of sculpture; the arcade and porch, too, are new external features'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.