The RSA has proudly promoted British contemporary art for almost three centuries.

From our very first years, many artists joined the RSA in the hope of turning it into an artists’ academy. They were successful in getting it to reward adult artists, as well as young people, for their creative flair. At the time there was a particular focus on encouraging history painting; imagined allegorical scenes from mythology, the Bible, or history. These were considered the highest form of art.

With the help of writer Samuel Johnson, they also persuaded the Society to hold the country’s first, dedicated exhibition of contemporary art, which took place from 1760 onwards. Unfortunately, the artists split in 1761 to hold a rival exhibition, because of a disagreement over how the exhibitions were being organised. The splinter faction – the Society of Artists of Great Britain – split again in 1768, over the same issue, with the new splinter group forming the Royal Academy. The RA’s annual exhibitions thus actually originate with the one we held in 1760.

Although we ceased holding exhibitions after a few years, it soon settled into a division of labour with the Royal Academy, encouraging many of the art forms and demographics that the RA neglected. Thus, we became one of the main sources of encouragement for sculptors, embroiderers, engravers, medallists, and female artists. We also continued to promote new history painting, offering up the walls of the Great Room as a sufficiently large and public space for such works – an opportunity taken by James Barry to create 'The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture', the largest work of its kind in the country.

Reinstated exhibitions spark significant spinoffs

But our work to promote contemporary art did not stop there. In the late 1840s, we hosted pioneering retrospective exhibitions of major living artists William Mulready and William Etty. This meant they could appreciate the honour rather than only being celebrated posthumously. In 1852-3 we held the world’s first major public exhibition devoted solely to photography. Soon after, the photographers formed what is now the Royal Photographic Society. It likewise was at the forefront of applying art to industry by hosting 1840s exhibitions of art manufactures and co-hosting a 1935 Exhibition of Art in Industry with the Royal Academy.

In 1949 we turned our attention to a relatively unappreciated field by holding an Exhibition of Humorous Art. More recently, in the 1990s we developed the initiative to use the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as a space for exhibiting the works of contemporary sculptors – doing for sculptors today what it had done for eighteenth-century history painters.