École des Beaux-Arts de Paris

“ L’École des Beaux Arts is another national institution. In all things the French passion for art is visible. Art is the one thing the entire race takes seriously. The capital is laid out to please the eye and captivate the senses like a work of art. This School of Fine Arts itself is connected with one of the most radiant bits of Paris. The bridge, called after it, seizes [165] one of the loveliest views of the city. It spans the river between the glorious Louvre and the imposing dome of the Institute. ”

“ The insistence upon tradition which is inseparable from academic teaching, seems to prevent those who accept its methods from ever expressing their full individuality. To find what is most vital in French sculpture one has therefore to look beyond the ranks of those who have been trained in the École des Beaux Arts. Nevertheless, no record of modern French art would be complete without some reference to the sculptures to be seen in every salon, which clearly owe their finest qualities to the teaching of that school. ”

“ Unfortunately the École des Beaux Arts does not escape the fault of all academies. Its system reduces the chance of failure to a minimum, but it does nothing to increase the proportion of supreme successes. ”

“ At the École des Beaux-Arts one learns, negatively, not to be ridiculous. This is a great deal; it is more than can be learned anywhere else nowadays—witness German, Italian, above all English exhibitions. Positively one learns the importance of style; and if it were not for academic French sculpture, one would say that this was something the importance of which could not be exaggerated. ”

“ Three hundred artists of different nations, some of whom are known by master-pieces, while others announce the genius necessary for producing them, are to be distributed in the seven classes of this academy, which include the fine arts of every description. Each artist being at liberty to follow the branch to which he is most partial, it may easily be conceived how noble an emulation will be roused by such an assemblage of talents. Several are now employed here in the workshops of Painting, Sculpture, Mosaic, and Engraving. ”

“ The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art, and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises an hierarchic authority over the Ecole de Rome, the Salons, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. ”

“ For commissions have been plentiful in America, and the need of being on the spot in order to secure them drew the sculptors home—on the whole to the betterment of their art. For it is the same with Paris, a university of the arts, as with Harvard, Yale or any other university of letters and science. ”

“ There always has been a fight on the part of the school to get what it wanted from the directors; but things can be done. Read the list of “illustrious names” of visiting instructors, years ago, and then compare the student roll of the same time. Once the Art Institute was an art school with art students, who were artists, who in spite of everything led the life of artists, knew the analogy between painting and the other Arts, swarmed to concerts and the theatres, and created their own atmosphere. ”

“ At great cost it is arranged to offer every facility for thorough, systematic and complete work in this direction. The school rooms and equipment are unequalled by the Artists' League for the Academy of Design in New York, and are not excelled by the great schools of Paris, up to the present time. ”

“ World-renowned American masters of Art were, at this time, in the hey-day of their success, and the walls of the Academy were annually adorned by important works from the hands of Sargent, Abbey, Whistler, Cecilia Beaux, Chase, Anschutz, Tanner, Weir, Lawson, Twatchman, and a host of brilliant young painters rising into fame. ”

“ All universities recognize literature in the sense of the old rhetoric, which is art incarnate in words. Some, to their credit, recognize art in its narrower sense, to a certain extent, and confer degrees for proficiency in some of its branches. If there are doctors of music, why should there be no masters of painting, of sculpture, of architecture? I should like to see professors of the fine arts in every university; and instruction in some branch of their work made a part of the arts curriculum. ”

“ The same fault is conspicuous in the new splendid gallery forming at Paris; though it seems an obvious thought that a school for artists ought to be arranged in such a manner, as to show the progressive discoveries and improvements in the art. ”

“ The present method of study in Paris—in such academies as that of Julian and the Colarossi—secures to the student the criticism and advice of the best artists of the day, while in summer—in the country and by the sea—there are artistic colonies in which students lead a delightful life, still profiting by the instruction of eminent masters.
Year by year the opportunities for art-study by women have been increased until they are welcome in the schools of the world, with rare exceptions. ”

“ In the summer of 1886 the smouldering discontent which always exists among artists in regard to the Royal Academy, although very often only the result of personal disappointment, threatened to burst into something like a flame. A letter appeared in the leading dailies proposing the establishment of a really National Exhibition of the Arts, which should include not only painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also the arts of design generally. ”

“ This is an Art Club in effect, as well as name; rooms are artistically furnished in beautiful color harmonies, and embellished with choice bronzes bought at our Academy exhibitions, and fine porcelains. Students are educated in art, for the practical good it will do them, and cultural growth; all are day workers. The faculty is composed of well known artists; classes include portrait and still life painting; illustration and sculpture. From this school have gone some of the most original workers in the schools of the Academy of the Fine Arts. Landscape classes are in session during the summer. ”

“ Nor would painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded and in which they would grow up. For Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance, a single delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their architecture. ”

“ A college of art founded in this part of the world cannot be expected, like a college of literature, to lay before its young members all that may be necessary to complete their knowledge and taste. What is to be had from books may be obtained almost every where; but the books of instruction by which the artist alone can be perfected, are those great works which still remain immoveable in that part of the world, where the fine arts in modern times have been carried to their highest degree of perfection. ”

“ I do not, indeed, ignore the fact that there is a school of artists belonging to this decade who set forth that beauty is not an essential part of art; which they consider rather as an instrument for the statement of fact, or an exhibition of the artist's intellectual observation and skill of hand. Such a school would seem at first sight to have an interest of its own as a genuine traditional development of the art of the eighteenth century, which, like all intellectual movements in that century, was negative and destructive ”

“ Now, it is a curious thing that, while we in America have, for the past twenty years, been discussing the question of whether any such thing as a national school of art exists here, in Paris "l'Ecole Américaine" has for fully as long a time been recognized as a distinct school, with a marked personal note of its own. ”

“ One is apt to forget in these enlightened days how greatly the art of painting benefited by the establishment of public exhibitions. Farington's observations on this point, occasioned by the inauguration of the exhibitions at the Society of Arts from 1760, until the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, are both instructive and amusing. ”

“ However meritorious the work of an English statuary, he would get no chance—does get no chance—in the Academy exhibition: and there is every justification for the opinion that it is not bad work which in this country produces official neglect, nor good work which in France has for many years led to the loving care with which sculpture is shown in Paris; but on the contrary, that the real opportunity which a French sculptor obtains has been just as instrumental in fostering the art there as our own utter neglect to appreciate sculpture of genius has been in stifling the art here. ”

“ So long as we have American paintings we shall have an American “school” in the sense that all American paintings taken together, whether few or many, whether good or bad, will be distinguished and distinguishable from the paintings of every other country. In that sense America has, and always has had, a “school” of painting, though for a long time the school was little more than a kindergarten.
America has no centre like Paris, or Rome, or Florence, where a large body of men and women are gathered from the four quarters of the globe to study art. ”

“ It is obvious that a college course in æsthetics must be inspirational, must seek to develop a real appreciation of the beauty of line, of color and of sound. Such a course must, therefore, encourage contact with the products of art, rather than promote the study of texts on the history of any of the arts. So, too, courses in music or in literature which do not send the student away with an intense desire to hear, to see, to feel the masterpieces of music or literature must be judged dismal failures. ”

“ The field of art education is large enough to be sub-divided to the advantage and welfare of all, but the Academy must be the highest school, the university of art teaching, or its school department has no reason for existence. ”

“ Yet, in the shape of elementary drawing, the rudiments of art are beginning to take their proper place in our schools as a necessary and indispensable element of all real education, and the art galleries and the foreign musicians of a few of our older cities are beginning to exert their influence, if a slight one, in introducing higher ideas of the importance of art into our new country. They will have but a limited influence, however, till the study of the fine arts takes its proper place among us as a necessary element in every conception of true education. ”

“ Many students still go to Paris to complete their studies, though there is a large body of accomplished painters teaching in the home schools, with satisfactory results as regards the work of their pupils. From their French training, many of the American artists have been charged with echoing Parisian art ”

“ The art-historian knows that academies neither produced a Pheidias nor a Praxiteles, neither a Raphael nor an Albert Dürer; neither a Rubens nor a Holbein; neither a Gainsborough nor a Hogarth; neither a Canova nor a Flaxman. For art-academies, as mere outgrowths of fashion, unless rooted in the earnest, artistic spirit of a nation, only foster mannerism, pander to the general bad taste of the wealthy classes, and one-sidedly cultivate portrait-painting, whilst they shut out landscape or historical figure-painting. Academies have rarely encouraged grand ideas ”

“ The ideals of English artists during the early years of the nineteenth century had sunk very low, and the standard of public taste was several degrees lower. Portrait-painting was the only lucrative branch of art, and the Academy was almost entirely in the hands of the portrait-painters, who gave little encouragement to works of imagination. ”

“ Already artists of distinction have pronounced her oil paintings of sufficient merit to entitle her to enter the Academy of Design in New York, and she has been advised to adopt art as a life vocation. ”

“ The vigour of his male, and the grace and elegance of his female, portraits are unsurpassable, the resemblance perfect and the technical execution such as to place the artist in the front rank. Between 1889 and 1900 the painter contributed to the Royal Academy of London. Few artists have received such a succession of noteworthy distinctions and recognitions. ”

“ The upshot, to some critics, is, in the present Academy exhibition, a sense of no little dissatisfaction, mingled with unstinted recognition of telling and well-diffused ability. One perceives that many artists can now do a good deal, if they choose; but the more sound one sees the attainments of the painter himself to be, the less one is disposed to accept with implicit faith the rather cheap outcome of those attainments. Sketches may be excellent things, and they testify to the ready availability of the artist's gifts: but sketches magnified into pictures cloy upon one. ”

“ After he returned to Paris, in 1824, Ingres’ ideal of perfectionism came to dominate academic art.
Behind it the Academy had the weight of traditionally accepted theory and the splendid accomplishments of the Old Masters. The theory, growing from ancient classical concepts of art, seemed infallible and, on such a theoretical basis, the five hundred years preceding the nineteenth century had produced an extremely impressive art. Imitation of idealized figures was the chief aim of the academic painter. By showing nature “as it 3 ought to be,” the artist served philosophical and ethical ends ”