ROYAL SOCIETY OF PORTRAIT PAINTERS
The Royal Society of Portrait Painters was founded in 1891 when a committee, under chairman Archibald John Stuart-Wortley (1849-1905), of James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923), George Percy Jacomb-Hood, Arthur Melville (1858-1904), and John Maler Collier (1850-1934) carried a proposal to form a Society of Portrait Painters. Wortley was its first President, and its first exhibition was deemed a critical success. The catalogue of the exhibition on 2 July 1891 in the rooms of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in Piccadilly, members listed include Percy Bigland (1857-1926), Charles Wellington Furse (1868-1904), Hugh de Twenebrokes Glazebrook (1855-1937), John McLure Hamilton (1853-1936), Heywood Hardy (1842-1933), Hubert von Herkomer, Henry John Hudson (1862-1911), Louise Jopling, Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856-1916), Henry Samuel William Llewellyn (1858-1941), William Mouat Loudan (1868-1925), Anna Lea Merritt (1844-1930), Frank Markham Skipworth (1854-1929), Annie Louise Swynnerton (1844-1933), William Robert Symonds, Mary Lemon Waller (1851-1931), Edwin Arthur Ward (1860-1933), Leslie Matthew Ward (1851-1922) (better known as 'Spy'), and Theodore Blake Wirgman (1848-1925). Their third annual exhibition which opened in May 1893 was moved to the newly opened Grafton Galleries in 8 Grafton Street, New Bond Street. In 1911 the society gained Royal patronage from King George V, becoming the Royal Society of Portrait Painters when a new wave of painters joined including William Newenham Montague Orpen (1878-1931), who broke with past conventions and sought new forms of expression. In 1930, when the Grafton Galleries lease expired, the Society held its 1931 exhibition at the Royal Institute Galleries in Piccadilly, but these were bombed in 1940 during the Second World War. The 1941-1945 exhibitions were held at the Royal Academy at Burlington House. In 1961 the Society became a founder member of the Federation of British Artists (FBA) and in 1971 the FBA moved to the Mall Galleries in London. The Society was incorporated as a private limited company and became a Registered Charity.
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