Collection: Academic Art

Academic art refers to the painting and sculpture produced under the influence of the European academies, principally the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, between approximately the late eighteenth century and 1900. It is defined less by a single style than by a shared training programme: cast drawing, life class, anatomy, perspective, the copying of Old Masters, and the hierarchy of genres that placed history painting at the top.

The Salon de Paris, controlled by the Académie until 1881, set the public face of the system. Jean-Léon Gérôme, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Ernest Meissonier, and Thomas Couture were among the most successful late nineteenth-century French representatives. The British academic line ran through Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Edward Poynter; the Austrian through Hans Makart in Vienna. They produced high-finish history paintings, mythologies, portraits, and Orientalist subjects collected on both sides of the Atlantic.

The 1863 Salon des Refusés, mounted in protest at the official Salon's rejections, marked the first public split between academic painting and the new movements. Modernist criticism dismissed the body of academic work for much of the twentieth century; later scholarship has reinstated it as both serious art and indispensable documentary evidence of period taste.