The members of the recently-founded Royal Academy are shown setting up the life-drawing class at Old Somerset House, in a lumber-room space filled with casts, packing cases and simple working furniture. There is a suggestion of Raphael’s School of Athens in their disposition and many hints that they are engaged in intellectual conversations about ancient and modern art and about the elements from which it is made – anatomy, drawing, colour, light and shadow. But these royal artists seem to be gentlemen of an amiable and clubbable disposition, with no self-importance and little apparent deference for their President or Patron. Painted for George III