The question was brought forward in a practical shape in 1773.  Two years earlier the State apartments at old Somerset Palace had been granted by the King to the Royal Academy.  The chapel was included in the gift; and it was soon after suggested, at a general meeting of the society, ’that the place would afford a good opportunity of convincing the public of the advantages that would arise from ornamenting churches and cathedrals with works of art.’[932] This proposal was highly approved of by the society, and many of its members at once volunteered their services.  Their president, however, Sir Joshua Reynolds, proposed a bolder scheme.  He thought they should ‘undertake St. Paul’s Cathedral.’  The amendment was carried unanimously.  Application was accordingly made to the Dean and Chapter, who were pleased with the offer.  Dean Newton, Bishop of Bristol, a great lover of pictures, was particularly favourable to the scheme, and warmly advocated it.[933] Sir Joshua promised ’The Nativity’; West offered his picture of ‘Moses with the Laws’; Barry, Dance, Cipriani, and Angelica Kauffman engaged to present other paintings; and four other artists were afterwards added to the number.  But the trustees of the building—­Cornwallis, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Terrick of London—­disapproved.  Terrick was especially hostile to the idea, and when the Dean waited upon him and told him, with some exultation, of the progress that had been made, put an absolute veto upon the whole project.  ‘My good Lord Bishop of Bristol,’ he said, ’I have been already distantly and imperfectly informed of such an affair having been in contemplation; but as the sole power at last remains with myself, I therefore inform your lordship that, whilst I live and have the power, I will never suffer the doors of the metropolitan church to be opened for the introduction of Popery into it.’[934]

Bishop Newton says, in his ‘Memoirs,’ that though there were some objectors, opinion was generally in favour of the offer made by the Academy, and that some churches and chapels adopted the idea.  But St. Paul’s probably suffered no loss through the further postponement of the decorations designed for it.  In the first place, paintings—­for these, rather than frescoes, appear to have been intended—­were not the most appropriate kind of art for such an interior.  Besides this, those ‘earthly charms and graces,’ which made Reynolds’ style such an abomination to the delicate spiritual perceptions of the artist-poet Blake,[935] were by no means calculated to create any elevated ideal among his countrymen of what Christian art should be.  And if the President of the Academy, the most renowned English painter of his age, was scarcely competent to such a work, what must be said of his proposed coadjutors?  ‘I confess,’ said Dean Milman, ’I shudder at the idea of our walls covered with the audacious designs and tawdry colouring of West, Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.’[936] Such criticism would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own province of art were great.  But it will universally be allowed that not to them, and scarcely to any other painters of the eighteenth century, could we look for the grandeur of thought or the elevated sentiment which an undertaking of the kind proposed so specially demanded.