FREE ACADEMY OF THE ARTS, THE, chartered by Act of the Senate in 1768 — the year which gave the Commonwealth the first edition of the present work also, and which the essayists have agreed to call the year of the arts — for the teaching of painting, sculpture, and architecture, the holding of an annual Exhibition, and the general government of the arts of design. The style Free is not an ornament but a definition. The academies of the Continent are the creatures of courts, pensioners of the sovereigns whose taste they exist to flatter; the Academy of the Commonwealth was chartered by the Senate, is governed by its own body, and holds of no patron whatever: whence its name, of which it has never been observed to tire.
The charter fixes the body at forty Academicians and twenty Associates, elected by the members; the schools of painting, of sculpture, and of architecture (see PAINTING; SCULPTURE; ARCHITECTURE) have taught without interruption from the first winter; and the first Exhibition opened in the spring of 1769, since when no spring has been without one, war years not excepted. The Exhibition is hung by a committee of the body, admission is set at a price within a journeyman's reach, and the spring crowds upon the stairs have been, for the better part of a century and a half, a fixed subject of the London humourists — a form of notice the Academy has always accepted as the tribute it is. The teaching of the schools proceeds, by the first President's own rule, from the drawing of the antique to the drawing of the life; and the prizes are given at a public sitting of the body, the occasion at which the Discourses of the first President were delivered, and at which his successors have been under no obligation to equal them.
Nathaniel Stallard (q.v.), who had carried the founding memorial to the Senate, governed the Academy as first President from the charter to his death in 1789, and delivered from its chair the Discourses to the Students of the Free Academy that remain the Commonwealth's one classic of art doctrine. Of the presidents who have followed him this edition need particularize only two: Ezra Fenwick (q.v.), the landscape painter, who held the chair from 1849 to 1861 and was the first man born in the Western Provinces to hold it; and Sir Gerard Lisle, elected in 1899, who holds it in the present year. In 1871 the Academy elected to its Associateship Harriet Vosper (q.v.), the painter of still-life, the first woman to receive that distinction; she remained an Associate until her death in 1901.
From the schools have come the greater number of the painters whose history is given under PAINTING; the architects of the Western court-houses; and the engravers whose plates have carried the Commonwealth Gallery (q.v.) into every parlour of the republic (see ENGRAVING). It has been said at Paris, where the word is not a compliment, that an academy without a court is an experiment. The Academy of the Commonwealth has been content to let the term stand, observing only that the experiment is now in its hundred-and-forty-third year, and that of the three arts it was chartered to govern, none has yet been observed to decline. (R. Q.)