Page 53 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

Lodge of the Nine Muses 53

courtesy the writer has been able to inspect some of the rooms not open to the public.
Cipriani also designed much of the other ornamental detail at Somerset House, in
consultation with the architect, Sir William Chambers, and saw it carried out by
a band of distinguished sculptors, among them Carlini. Cipriani also collaborated
with Sir William on another structure even better known to many than Somerset
House – the state coach used by the Sovereign at the opening of Parliament. Sir
William devised the coach, and Cipriani performed the allegorical paintings with
which it is copiously embellished. The creation of this extravagant machine gave to
both an unaccustomed opportunity for, artistically speaking, shaking a loose leg, and
they availed themselves of it to the full; it is a truly astonishing effort.
Carlini was himself appointed Keeper of the Royal Academy in 1783 and held
the post till his death in 1790. He was a bit of a Bohemian, and scandalised his
more elegant colleagues by walking from his house in Marylebone to his office
at Somerset House disreputably clad and smoking a cutty pipe. He had, however,
a proper regard for occasions of state, and turned up for the annual Academy
banquets in a sedan chair, arrayed in purple silk coat and breeches, gold-laced
23
waistcoat, point lace ruffles, sword and bag, dressy even for that resplendent age.
At a rather later period another accomplished painter became a member,
George Watson, who joined the Lodge in 1818. He worked for a time in London
as pupil or assistant to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and afterwards set up as a portrait
painter in Edinburgh, where in 1826 he became the first President of the Royal
Scottish Academy. Though hardly of the stature of Ramsay or Raeburn he was
a fine craftsman; two admirable portraits of his were shown at the Burlington
House Exhibition of Scottish Art in the winter of 1938-9, where no doubt many
members noticed them.
Another R.A. was John Peter Gandy (1818), later Deering, a leading London
architect of the early nineteenth century; at forty he inherited an estate near
Great Missenden, and, abandoning art for a country life and politics, became M.P.
for Aylesbury, and in 1840 High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire.
The Lodge can also claim several skilful miniature painters, such as G. M.
Brighty (1814), who gave, and may have painted, the I.P.M.’s jewel, William
Hincks (1779), and James Holmes (1819), a boon companion of George IV. At

23 Somerset House, Old and New, by R. Needham and A. Webster.