How to Apply to the Royal Academy of Art

Jean-Baptiste Martin, A Meeting of the Imperial Academy of Painting and Sculpture at the Louvre, c. 1712–21, oil on canvas, 30 x 43 cm (Louvre)

In a room filled to the brim with painting and sculpture, well-dressed men in powdered wigs assemble around a desk while stragglers chat with their neighbors. Jean-Baptiste Martin'southward minor painting depicts a meeting of the distinguished French art academy without an creative person's tool in sight—simply the ornate room situates the scene in the Louvre palace. The choice to not testify the artists at work, but rather as fashionable gentlemen engaged in sociable intellectual commutation speaks directly to the early history of the French Royal Academy.

The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Regal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) was established in 1648. It oversaw—and held a monopoly over—the arts in France until 1793. The establishment provided indispensable training for artists through both hands-on education and lectures, access to prestigious commissions, and the opportunity to showroom their work. Significantly, it as well controlled the arts by privileging certain subjects and past establishing a hierarchy amongst its members. This hierarchical structure ultimately led to the Académie'due south dissolution during the French Revolution. However, the Académie in Paris became the model for many art academies beyond Europe and in the colonial Americas.

Foundation

This preeminent grooming system for painters and sculptors was founded in response to two related concerns: a nationalistic want to establish a decidedly French creative tradition, and the demand for a large number of well-trained artists to fulfill of import commissions for the royal circumvolve. Previous monarchs had imported artists (primarily from Flanders and Italy), to execute major projects. In contrast, King Louis 14 sought to cultivate and support French artists as part of his grander project of self-fashioning, with art playing a vital role in the structure of the royal paradigm.

The Académie quickly rose to prominence, in conjunction with the Ministry of Arts (responsible for construction, decoration, and upkeep of the male monarch'southward buildings) and the Outset Painter to the King—the nearly prestigious title an artist could reach. 2 men were integral to the institution's early on history: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, an increasingly influential statesman who acted as the institution's protector, and the artist Charles Le Brun, who would go along to be both First Painter and the Académie's Managing director. Both men sought to elevate the condition of artists by emphasizing their intellectual and artistic capacities, and both sought to differentiate members of the Académie—academicians— from guild members (guilds were a medieval organisation that strictly regulated artisans). The Académie, whose members were financially supported by the King, moved into its permanent location at the Louvre Palace in 1692, further reinforcing the institution's condition. Given such institutional preoccupations, Martin's decision to show artists equally gentlemen socializing rather than equally artisans laboring takes on new significance.

Hierarchies

From its inception, the Académie was structured effectually bureaucracy. In that location were distinct levels of membership that an artist could advance through over time. In art, besides, at that place was a hierarchy: painting was prioritized over sculpture, and sure subjects were considered more noble than others. To get a member, artists submitted work for evaluation past academicians, who accepted them at a certain level, based on the kind of subjects they aspired to paint. If they passed this first phase, applicants would execute a "reception piece" depicting a subject field chosen by the academicians.

The Académie divided paintings into five categories, or genres, ranked in terms of difficulty and prestige:

1. History Painting—encompassing highbrow subjects taken from the classical tradition, the bible, or allegories, this blazon of painting was considered the highest genre because it required proficiency in depicting the human body, likewise as imagination and intellect to draw what could not be seen. These were ofttimes large-scale multi-figure paintings.
2. Portraiture —focusing on capturing likeness, this genre was prestigious, and certainly lucrative, just less and so than history painting. Portraitists were derided for "simply" copying nature rather than inventing (an oversimplification equally few portraits were executed entirely from life).
3. Genre Painting —depicting scenes of everyday life, this genre included the human effigy merely ostensibly did not represent 1000 ideas, although many genre paintings had moralizing undertones. Genre paintings were smaller in size than history paintings, further detracting from their prestige.
4. Landscapes —consisting of all representations of rural or urban topography, existent or imagined, this genre became especially popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
5. Still Life Painting —often indulging in the juxtaposition of colors and textures, these paintings represented inanimate (often luxury) objects and drew heavily on the seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of such subjects. While at times other moralizing symbols such as memento mori (reminders of homo mortality) were included, these were not an intrinsic function of the genre, which was considered to crave no invention on the office of the artist (since, they were painting what they could see).

Training

Benoît-Louis Prévost, after Charles-Nicolas Cochin, "The Schoolhouse of Art" ("Ecole de dessein"), planche I. Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts mécaniques, avec leur explications, volume 3 (Paris, 1763)

Nicolas Bernard Lépicié, Seated Male person Nude Facing Right, mid-18th century, charcoal, stumped, blackness chalk heightened with white on gray-green newspaper, l.7 x 34 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Academic instruction was centered on drawing (following the precedent of Italian cartoon schools established in the sixteenth century). The Académie maintained a rigid curriculum to instruct artists, every bit recorded in contemporary accounts and depictions. An etching illustrating a 1763 description of the "school of art" shows how students first learned to draw by copying drawings and engravings (seen on the left) before moving on to drawing plaster casts to learn how to translate the three-dimensional course into two dimensions (seen at centre). Students would then copy large-scale sculpture (every bit seen at the right-most edge) earlier being immune to depict the live nude model (as seen in the eye-right portion, slightly fix dorsum from the foreground). Drawing the male nude form was the bedrock of the Académie's curriculum, an essential building block for painters, particularly those destined to produce history paintings. Students produced many single-effigy nude studies, known as académies, such as this example from Nicolas Bernard Lépicié. Props could be added afterwards to transform the posed bodies into identifiable figures, as Bernard Picart has done with the cartoon Male Nude with a Lamp, where the figure, with the addition of a lamp, becomes the philosopher Diogenes.

Bernard Picart, Male Nude with a Lamp (Diogenes), 1724, red chalk on laid paper,30.9 x 45.vii cm (National Gallery of Fine art)

In a lively drawing, Charles Natoire depicts himself in a crimson cape in the left foreground, providing feedback on students' drawings. The majority of students work independently, focused on the two nude models in an intertwined pose selected by the supervising professor. The opportunity to written report two interacting male bodies was a rarer and more challenging exercise.

Charles Joseph Natoire, Life Class at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 1746, pen, black & brown ink, grey wash & watercolour & traces of pencil over black chalk on laid newspaper, 45.3 10 32.ii cm (The Courtauld Gallery)

Outside of the Académie'due south official spaces, academicians would provide advanced students opportunities to draw nude female person models. In addition to supervising cartoon education, each professor selected students to be function of his studio. This is where artists actually learned to pigment or sculpt by emulating their teacher, often contributing to his large-scale commissions. Studio practices varied, and non all studio members were necessarily enrolled Académie students.

Both academicians and students attended lectures addressing theoretical and applied aspects of artistic practice, such as the importance of expressions or how to use paint to ensure longevity. These were offered past professors and so-chosen amateurs. These honorary Académie members were not professional person artists merely art lovers and "friends of artists"—often from the dignity—who advised artists on questions of composition, aesthetics, and iconography and often championed sure artists, sometimes as patrons or collectors.

The depict of Rome

The classical tradition was primal to the Académie'south curriculum. In 1666, the Académie opened a satellite in Rome to facilitate students' report of artifact. In 1674, the Académie established the Prix de Rome (Rome Prize), a prestigious honor that allowed its most promising artists to written report in Rome for 3 to five years. While the focus of the French Academy in Rome was facilitating the study of classical antiquity, students as well drew after of import Renaissance and Baroque artworks, equally seen in Hubert Robert's ruby-red chalk drawing depicting an artist copying Domenichino's fresco in a Roman church building.

Hubert Robert, Draftsman in the Oratory of Southward. Andrea, South. Gregorio al Celio, 1763, red chalk, 32.9 ten 44.8 cm (Morgan Library & Museum)

While in Rome, these Académie students—chosen pensionnaires—studied approved artworks and regularly sent their drawings and copies later on important works back to Paris to demonstrate their progress. Although not function of the formal curriculum, most artists explored the Roman environs, taking inspiration from the rich mural, diverse topography, and colorful scenes of peasant life. Important connections were forged in Rome with other artists, patrons, and supporters.

Salons and the rise of public opinion

Beginning in 1667, the Académie established exhibitions to provide members with the crucial opportunity to brandish their piece of work to a wider audience, thereby cultivating potential patrons and disquisitional attention. Held annually and, later on, biannually, these exhibitions came to be known as Salons, afterwards the Louvre's salon carré where they took place later on 1725. The Salon became a significant space of artistic substitution and an important opportunity to view art prior to the germination of the public art museum.

Artworks in the Salon were selected by a jury of academicians. Paintings were displayed according to size and genre, with larger works (history painting and portraiture) occupying the more prestigious college levels, as can be seen in an engraving of the Salon of 1785 where Jacques-Louis David'due south Oath of the Horatii features prominently in the center. With the 1737 introduction of a broader public to the Salon came the advent of public opinion and the emergence of art criticism. The Académie published a booklet that listed the displayed works, organized by the artist'south rank, called the livret. Art collectors and learned Salon-goers penned opinions analyzing the artistic and intellectual merit of the exhibited artworks; some of these, like those written past philosopher Denis Diderot, were meant for a small customs of like-minded individuals both in France and beyond, only increasingly art criticism was printed in newspapers for access by a broader public.

Genders and genres

The Académie was a male space, for the nigh function; some painters accepted female person students in their studios, especially in the concluding quarter of the eighteenth century. Women artists were barred past propriety from studying the male nude figure, a core aspect of Academic training. This rendered them unable to become officially recognized history painters, and they were therefore restricted to genres considered to be less intellectually rigorous. During its 150-year long history, the Académie only welcomed 4 women as full members: Marie-Thérèse Reboul was admitted in 1757; Anne Vallayer-Coster was admitted in 1770; Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun were both admitted in 1783.

This was the artist's reception piece for the Académie. Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le-Brun, Peace Bringing Back Affluence, 1780, oil on canvass, 103 ten 133 cm (Louvre)

Despite their acceptance to the Académie, these women had limited options. Painting primarily nonetheless-lifes (like Reboul), Vallayer-Coster elevated that genre with big-calibration ornate compositions. Labille-Guiard led a large studio of female students and was well-known as a prominent portraitist. Then too did Vigée-LeBrun, who pushed the boundaries of genre and her gender by occasionally painting allegories, including her reception piece for the Académie. Familial connections (in the case of Reboul, Labille-Guiard, and Vigée-LeBrun) or regal protectors (in the case of Vallayer-Coster, Labille-Guiard, and Vigée-LeBrun) played vital roles in their success. Without such champions, female person artists were unable to penetrate the patriarchal institution of the Académie. Still, their work and personal lives were subjected to undue public scrutiny and their achievements were oftentimes maligned.

Abolition and afterlives

In the 1780s, the Académie came under attack by members and outsiders for politicizing the distribution of prizes and honors. Its rigid hierarchies, inequitable structures, and rampant nepotism were incompatible with the Revolution'due south core values of Liberty and Equality. Major artists who had benefited from the institution lobbied for its dissolution. With the overthrow of the monarchy and Louis Xvi's execution, institutions with indelible royal connections were scrutinized and deemed irrelevant. The Académie was abolished on Baronial 8, 1793 past club of the National Convention.

After several years of hardship for artists brought well-nigh past the erosion of majestic, noble, and ecclesiastical patronage during the Revolution, the Directory government revived many of the structures of the Académie in establishing a National Institute of Sciences and Arts (Institut nationale des sciences et des arts, later Institut de France) in 1795. The new system'southward membership included many one-time academicians, who reinstated certain aspects of the now-defunct Académie, such equally the Rome Prize in 1797. The hierarchy of genres, inculcated in the Académie's members and audiences, remained central to understanding the arts throughout the nineteenth century.

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Additional resources
Institut de France

Académie des beaux-arts

Denis Diderot, Salons (tome I – 3), Paris: J.L.J Briere Libraire, 1821

The Salon and the Royal Academy in the Nineteenth Century

Laura Auricchio, Melissa Lee Hyde, Mary Sheriff, and Jordana Pomeroy, Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections (Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., 2012).

Colin B Bailey, "'Artists Drawing Everywhere': The Rococo and Enlightenment in France," in Jennifer Tonkovich et al., Drawn to Greatness: Chief Drawings from the Thaw Collection (New York: Morgan Library & Museum, 2017).

Albert Boime, "Cultural Politics of the Art Academy," The Eighteenth Century  vol. 35, no three (1994), pp. 203–22.

Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1985).

Christian Michel, The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: The Birth of the French School, 1648–1793, translation by Chris Miller (The Getty Research Constitute, 2018).

Richard Wrigley, T he Origins of French Fine art Criticism: from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford University Press, 1993).

Cite this folio as: Daniella Berman, "The Formation of a French School: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture," in Smarthistory, September 2, 2020, accessed April 29, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/imperial-university-france/.

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Source: https://smarthistory.org/royal-academy-france/

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