The South Australian Society of Arts formed in 1856 to become the oldest and continuous arts group in Australia
The South Australian Society of Arts would get a warrant to add "royal" to its name in 1935. (The H.P.Gill graphic, above, for the South Australian Society of Arts is incorrect in ascibing its founding to 1857 – as against the accurate 1856.)
The South Australian Society of Arts was formed to promote the fine arts in the province, at a meeting on Monday evening, October 13, 1856, at Charles Hill's Adelaide School of Arts, in Pulteney Street, Adelaide city. This was the start of Australia’s oldest continuously running art society.
Owing poor weather, very few attended the 1856 meeting. With architect James Macgeorge in the chair, the meeting decided that the annual payment of one guinea would entitle the society subscriber to all the benefits of membership: free admission to all lectures, meetings, and exhibitions of the society: “A donation of painting, sculpture, or other such grant of not less value than £10 sterling, or of £10 in money, shall entitle the donor to all the advantages of membership for life; the Society reserving the right to decline any unsuitable object.”
The society would be governed by a president, two vice presidents and a committee of 10, to be elected annually. The meeting requested “Mr Hill to secure promises of membership, and to convene a meeting of the members for arranging the operations of the Society as soon as 50 names are enrolled.” The South Australian governor Richard MacDonnell would be asked to be the society’s first patron and “the committee take the necessary steps to have the society incorporated into the South Australian Institute”.
The society did not “suppose that, with the materials at present in the colony, any very rapid strides could be made in the development of works of art of any high pretensions. But the taste for the fine arts which exists without doubt among our community might be cultivated to a point that would give South Australia no mean position in this hemisphere”.
It had “no doubt that this society, if successful, will ultimately include a school of design, and the exhibition of improvements in colonial manufactures. Under the proposed rules of the Society, it will be perceived that the promoters already contemplate the exhibition of works of art, either 'pictorial, ornamental, or useful,' and in this they partially carry out the views we would express. It would be necessary to make the laws of the Institution on such a basis as would tend to encourage those manufactures adapted to colonial wants, and involve the development of colonial resources.”