Royal Academy Schools receives £10m from Tetra Pak heir

Britain’s oldest art school, a 250-year-old institution which offers postgraduate students a three-year art course free of charge, has received its biggest ever donation.

The Royal Academy of Arts said on Monday that the £10m gift from the Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing would go to restoring and renewing a historic central London campus which many people do not even realise exists.

The RA Schools was founded in 1769 and has taught artists from JMW Turner, John Constable and William Blake to more recent graduates Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Catherine Story and Eddie Peake.

It occupies subterranean space between the RA’s main buildings, Burlington House, on Piccadilly, and 6 Burlington Gardens, which faces Mayfair. It is unusual, probably unique, in that it offers three years of art studies which are free of charge. This year 767 people applied for the 17 places on offer.

Christopher Le Brun, president of the RA, said the school was one of the organisation’s founding purposes and the gift of money would ensure its continuation for the next 250 years.

He said the artists and architects who run the RA want the education side of its operations to be better known. “The general perception is that we are a set of exhibition galleries with the most wonderful exhibition programme you can imagine … the academy as an academy had somehow slipped out of sight.”

The RA has costed the necessary improvements – which cover everything from new plumbing and electrics to providing a better library – at £15m.

The gift comes from a charitable fund in the name of Julia and Hans Rausing, one of Britain’s richest men. He hit the headlines in 2012 when the body of his drugs-dependent first wife Eva was discovered under several feet of duvets, blankets, tarpaulin and TV screens in their vast Chelsea home.

Her body had lain there for about two months. The reclusive Rausing hid his wife, he said, because he could not face her being dead. He was given a suspended prison sentence for preventing the lawful burial of her body.

Rausing married Christie’s art expert Julia Delves Broughton in 2014. The couple’s charitable fund has given over 220 grants totalling more than £185m since it was founded.

Rebecca Salter, Keeper of the RA, said the Rausing gift would allow restoration and renewal of the campus: “This is unashamedly not an expansion of the RA Schools, we are small, we are free and we are going to stay that way.”

The RA has been run on the same principles for 250 years, with money raised by the annual Summer Exhibition going towards providing the school’s free art education.

Kira Freije, who graduated in 2016, said the RA course gives you an opportunity to fail as an artist, and time to recover: “I graduated feeling equipped with the right attitude and ambition to pursue whatever comes next.”

The plan is to begin work in 2021 and keep students at the school while it is carried out around them in phases.