High life

The Royal Academy have been lent W.P. Firth’s “Private View at the Royal Academy 1881” and are displaying it in the Lee and James C Slaughter Room.

It is a wonderfully busy picture which puts the viewer in the place of one wall of the exhibition. You look at the crowds of visitors much as you would do now. Alongside the picture is a key to who the people are and they include the great, good and notorious of Victorian London.

You can imagine the equivalent today on those Evening Standard magazine pages which show celebrities arriving at cultural events!

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