St Martin's Lane Academy
The closest approximation to an academic life-drawing class was established in Great Queen Street in 1711 under twelve directors, with Sir Godfrey Kneller as its governor.[1] Sir James Thornhill took over from Kneller in 1718, but a few years later, after a period of infighting, he started a new academy,[1] conducting life-drawing classes from a room he added to his own house in James Street, Covent Garden, from 1724[2] while a faction led by John Vanderbank and Louis Chéron set up what they advertised as "The Academy for the Improvement of Painters and Sculptors by drawing from the Naked" at premises in St Martin's Lane.[4] The membership of the academy was formed from an informal, club-like circle that was in the habit of meeting at Old Slaughter's Coffee House, which had been at 74 and 75, St. Martin's Lane since 1692, when the neighbourhood was still distinctly suburban.He was for some years curate at Cannons, Middlesex, where the prominent cabinet-maker of St. Martin's Lane William Hallett had built a residence on part of the foundations of the great demolished house.Desmond Fitz-Gerald notes that an asterisk in the list of subscribers to Joshua Kirby's, Dr Brook Taylor's Method of Perspective Made Easy (London 1754) identifies members of the St. Martin's Lane Academy, and notes as further members the architect James Paine; Charles, son of Henry Cheere, sculptor; and Johann Sebastian Müller, an engraver of Chippendale's Director.[13] The painters involved in the academy were reacting against the Italianate Late Baroque manner exemplified by Thornhill himself,[14] while the designers were developing alternatives to the cool Neo-Palladianism being espoused at the time by Lord Burlington and William Kent; the rococo artists found patrons, as Mark Girouard first noted, in the circle that formed around Frederick, Prince of Wales in Leicester Square."[22] At a later date it was "over a Neck of Veal and Potatoes, at the Old Slaughter Coffee House",[23] that the liberal scientific Club of Honest Whigs, centred on the figure of Benjamin Franklin was formed.