Tuesday–Sunday: 10am – 6pm
Closed on Monday
Burlington House,
Piccadilly,
London, W1J 0BD
The closest stations are:
In 1768, 36 artists and architects signed a petition to “establish a society for promoting the Arts of Design” and proposed and an annual exhibition. When it was presented to the king, George III, he said yes. That is how the Royal Academy of Arts and the Summer Exhibitions were born.
The first home of the Royal Academy of Arts was Somerset House, designed by Sir William Chambers and which houses today, the Courtauld Gallery. It moved to Trafalgar Square in the 1830s with the National Gallery before moving to its final home in 1867, in Burlington House.
The collection contains about 935 paintings, 350 sculptures, 700 plaster casts, 25,000 prints and drawings and 5,000 historic photographs. Its central focus is on British art and artists from the 18th century to the present day.
See some of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance drawing, including Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon and the studies by Leonardo and Michelangelo for their murals commissioned by the Florentine government for the newly constructed council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio.