Rice pips Lloyd Webber with Academy loan

SIR Tim Rice is lending four works from his private art collection to an exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse.

Sir Tim's famous writing partner Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of the biggest collectors of Pre-Raphaelite art in Britain. But it is Sir Tim who will be one of the major lenders to the Royal Academy show.

It will be the first Waterhouse exhibition in Britain since 1971 with more than 40 paintings along with sketchbooks and drawings. Waterhouse was born in 1849, a year after a group of Royal Academy students founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which opposed the conservatism of the Academy.

Other highlights of the Academy's new programme include an Anish Kapoor exhibition. The centrepiece will be Svayambh - a Sanskrit word roughly translated as "shaped by its own energy" - which has only been shown twice before and never in Britain.

It is a red, wax-like block that moves almost imperceptibly along tracks. Other shows include a survey of the modern British sculptors Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Eric Gill.

It will include Rock Drill, a menacing sculpture in bronze which became one of Epstein's most famous works and Ecstasy, one of Gill's most discussed. Carved in stone it shows a copulating couple.

Next year's programme will begin with an exhibition devoted to the 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio - the first in London for more than 30 years. Marking 500 years since his birth, it will show the enormous influence of the Italian on buildings, including Chiswick House. In the suite of restored Neo-Palladian galleries known as the John Madejski Rooms, the Academy is going to show major works given by early members.

Charles Saumarez Smith, the Academy's chief executive, said: "The programme for 2009 promises to be exciting, varied and adventurous, with Japanese prints and Palladian architecture in the spring, the ever-green Summer Exhibition, and a particularly strong concentration on sculpture in the autumn."