The King's Artists is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on art institutions, as art historians continue to move away from the paradigm of the monograph and seek to assess art and the production of art in a broader cultural and political framework. This book is also a welcome companion to the excellent essays on the exhibitions of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, Art on the Line, edited by David Solkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). The essays in Art on the Line focus on the shifts in aesthetic taste, the politics of the exhibition hangings, dissemination, and display over the period 1780–1836. The King's Artists, by contrast, concentrates on the Royal Academy as a formal “national” organization, from its foundation in 1768 until the Age of Reform. One of the primary themes of the book is an examination of the way in which the Academy sought to position itself vis-à-vis the connoisseurs as advisor to the state, without compromising its own artistic independence.

Hoock rightly points out that a trend toward formal organization generally, and changes in relations between the arts, the nation, and the state were crucial to the transformation of the British art world (3). He then positions his book against the current dominant historiography on the commercialization of culture which, although immensely enriching, is not adequate for the evaluation of formal organizations, particularly in the ways in which they interacted with agencies of the state and contributed to the construction of a national identity (9–10). The book is divided into three sections—“Academies of Art,” “The Politicization of Art,” and “Forging the Cultural State”—thereby allowing Hoock to examine the different facets of the Academy—as a national school, as a potential political sphere, and as an arbiter of national taste—without being encumbered by the constraints of a plodding chronology. He draws comparisons and contrasts with provincial and colonial schools of art, other national organizations concerned with the arts (especially the British Institution), and continental European academies, in order to articulate the Academy's role as a peculiar hegemonic model and its place within Britain's idiosyncratic political culture. With great skill and intelligence, Hoock employs rich, previously mostly untapped, archival material, as well as an impressive range of secondary resources.

The most significant and original contributions are in sections 2 and 3. In “The Politicization of Art” Hoock articulates, as no one has done before, George III's considerable involvement in the Academy and the Academy as a backdrop for Wilkesite radicalism and royal and political intrigue. He also examines the Academy's struggle to remain bipartisan, especially when individuals and factions within the Academy push it to the brink of implosion around the turn of the century. “Forging the Cultural State” documents the Academy's bids to enhance the professional status of artists by succeeding in having customs duties on imports of art waived for artists, gaining exemptions for artists from Pitt's trebling of assessed taxes, and securing copyright legislation for models and casts in sculpture. In the climactic final chapter, “Monumental Miracles,” Hoock discusses St. Paul's Cathedral as a British pantheon, various schemes from the turn of the century for war memorials, and the state's acquisition of the Elgin marbles. The acknowledgment of Parliament's identification with the freedom-loving Athens of Pericles, in contrast with Napoleon's ill-fated translatio imperii, is particularly telling. The Academy's evolution from mere advisor on sites to official arbiter of national taste is documented within these campaigns.

The Royal Academy has too often been characterized or criticized as a static entity intent only on the promotion of a few artists and the notion of polite taste. This book is a refreshing evaluation of a powerful—and vibrant—arts organization. Yet, there are a few omissions. Hoock contends that there was no sustained investment in public monuments or the patronage of the arts by the state in Britain prior to the mid-1790s, evidence that “certain kinds of monumentality still seemed to sit uneasily with British political and cultural sensibilities” (256). Consequently, London lacked the grandeur of centers of absolutism (Versailles, Vienna) or the arches, squares, and architecture envisioned by the French revolutionaries. Unfortunately, this construct does not accommodate New Somerset House (Hoock discusses Somerset House only as a home for the Royal Academy and as an exhibition space). Built by the state in the 1770s, it was one of the grandest civic structures in eighteenth-century Europe, and an unambiguous bombastic monument of imperial might. Designed by William Chambers and ornamented by other Royal Academicians, it is also a revealing study of the early Academy's relation with the state. If anything, the state's willingness to embark on such a complex structure and then its inability to bring outdoor monuments to the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar to completion a few decades later is indicative of the porous British state, a fundamental theme in the book. Nor does Hoock address ephemeral art sponsored by the state: the transparencies, parades, music, and fireworks that periodically transformed London. The commemorations of Cornwallis's victory in the Third Mysore War are especially germane to the discussion of the establishment of the Committee of Taste. Furthermore (admittedly because of the mandate of the book) Hoock does not go outside the realm of the state or of the Academy and thus does not explore works of art that were commissioned privately for public consumption by men who held public office; these also articulate the nature of the British state. Finally, while Hoock is very good on the political and royal machinations of the 1770s and later, his discussion of the same for the 1760s is sparse; a thorough analysis of George III's early patronage of the arts in the lead up to the foundation of the Royal Academy is still needed.

Ultimately however, The King's Artists is a careful analysis of the inner machinations of the Academy and the Academy's relations with the state. Hoock succeeds in repositioning the Royal Academy as an active site of political exchange in British culture. This book is an intelligent, and necessary, critical addition to the study of British culture.