The Royal Drawing School — ‘making drawing accessible to all’ — celebrates its first 25 years

It began with a prince, an artist, a handful of students in an attic room and a deep-rooted belief in the necessity of drawing. Twenty-five years on, and the Royal Drawing School (RDS) is a thriving institution offering more than 350 courses, ranging from drop-in sessions and short modules to the highly regarded postgraduate drawing year.

To commemorate the School’s first quarter of a century, the RDS is staging The Power of Drawing: Marking 25 Years of the Royal Drawing School, 1-26 July 2025, at its studios in Shoreditch, London. The exhibition brings together alumni and acclaimed creatives to highlight the essential role that drawing plays in all artistic fields. Participants include the painters David Hockney and Chantal Joffe, the sculptor Antony Gormley, the architect Norman Foster and the designer Jony Ive.

Acting principal Harry Parker says the exhibition signifies a key moment in the institution’s history: ‘It’s a chance to reflect on where we’ve come from. Our community has broadened and diversified over the years, and I think that has a lot to do with our way of teaching. We give students the confidence to express themselves.’

The RDS was founded as the Prince’s Drawing School in 2000, by the then Prince of Wales — now King Charles III — and the painter Catherine Goodman, during a perceived crisis in traditional drawing. It is difficult to imagine today, when a sketch by Lucian Freud can fetch around £500,000 at auction. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when observational drawing was considered a thing of the past. The main condition of culture was post-modern, with a focus on the potential future galaxies of the newly formed World Wide Web. What need would there be for drawing where art was heading?

Dissenting voices — among them Peter Blake, Anish Kapoor and Hockney — invoked the painter Pierre Bonnard’s argument that learning to draw is like learning your ‘ABC’: you can’t write poetry until you know your letters. Catherine Goodman and King Charles were also of that mind. They believed that this vital skill should not be lost, so they opened a school where the public could access specialist tuition in observational drawing.

A quarter of a century later, the results speak for themselves: many of the students who have taken the rigorous postgraduate programme have gone on to develop a career in the arts — including Parker, who first came to the RDS in 2010 on the recommendation of Queen Camilla (then Duchess of Cornwall).

In 2009, Parker was 26 and serving as a captain in the British Army in Afghanistan when he stepped on a concealed explosive device. He suffered catastrophic injuries and lost both his legs, an event recounted in his book, Hybrid Humans. Queen Camilla visited him while he was in recovery and, after seeing one of his paintings, suggested he consider taking a course at the RDS.

Drawing, says Parker, gave him back his future. His experience reflects the School’s remit to broaden access to the arts. ‘It is one of the key messages we promote: that the School should remain open to all, regardless of background or circumstances,’ he says.

To help facilitate this, Christie’s Fund for the Arts sponsors a graduating artist each year to develop a solo show at its King Street gallery. In February it was the turn of Louis Pohl Koseda. His drawings of the UK’s capital city, presented as a febrile dog-eat-dog world set against a backdrop of good old London stock brick, portray inequality as insistently as the works of William Hogarth did back in the 18th century.

Koseda’s artworks will feature in the The Power of Drawing alongside those of other alumni, such as Christina Kimeze and Somaya Critchlow, who are currently making waves in the art world. Kimeze’s thrilling exhibition at the South London Gallery earlier this year drew on the revival of roller-skating in the Black community. Critchlow is currently showing The Chamber at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a series of paintings made in response to the museum’s Old Masters collection.

‘It is great to see our graduates starting to have an impact,’ says Parker. ‘There is something really interesting happening, where traditional drawing skills are being fused with contemporary concerns.’

For the future, the RDS is expanding its online presence to reach those who, for whatever reason, cannot make it to the School’s premises. ‘We are streaming digital classes from museums and galleries,’ says Parker. ‘A teacher will take a particular painting, pose the model in a similar way, and talk the students through the artist’s process.’

Parker is also keen to see the RDS develop its educational reach into primary and secondary schools. The Young Artists programme — which teaches drawing and observational skills to 10- to 18-year-olds — has proved highly popular, and confirmed Parker’s belief that drawing enriches a child’s education. ‘We are seeing drawing being eroded in the school curriculum,’ he says. ‘We want to support teachers to help children retain those skills.’

‘Drawing is one of the most direct ways of engaging with the world, and provides a foundational route to human creativity,’ says His Majesty the King. ‘The School remains one of the few institutions worldwide dedicated to high-quality, observational drawing. I am immensely proud of its significant contribution to making drawing accessible to all.’

Part of the Royal Drawing School’s 25th anniversary programme, The Power of Drawing is on show at 19-22 Charlotte Road, London, 1-26 July 2025

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