The History and Philosophy
of Art Education- Cont.

. . . . Colbert, the king's most powerful minister, took a deep interest in making the academy an efficient branch of the civil service, and Le Brun became the virtual dictator of French art when he was given charge of the Gobelins, the workshops for furnishing the royal palaces. French artists would hardly have dared to disagree on art matters with Le Brun now, since Colbert, who was bent on supplying the new French navy with galley slaves, and who favoured the pillory for indifferent craftsmen, had placed appointments, commissions, prizes, and art education in his hands. Colbert was determined, through Le Brun, to create a well-ordered style of French art, which would compare with the classical style of French literature that the Acadé'mie Française was formulating by approved forms of grammar, poetry, and rhetoric. An academic art training, which started with drawing each part of the body from models based on parts of Greek statuary and ended with compositions of Classical epics, was an obvious parallel to grammar and literature. For this type of art education, contact with the source of copies of Classical art was essential, and in 1666 Colbert set up the AcadÚmie de France at Rome. [p. 25]

The academy in France with its protector, four vice-protectors, a director, four rectors, twelve professors, and six councillors, was modeled upon the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, but it was essentially a national institution, having none of the private character of the later Royal Academy in London . . . . Entrants had to be members of an approved workshop, and a monthly examination of their work by the professors determined whether they were to be allowed to continue their studies or to be promoted. Patronage provided prize competitions and medals, the ultimate success being the Prix de Rome, which entitled the recipient to study for three or four years at the AcadÚmie de France in Rome. The usual subject for a prize work was a heroic or religious epic, intended as an allegory of some actual achievement or devotion of the ruling monarch, for example, a conquest by Alexander, a labour of Hercules, the triumph of some virtue, or a Biblical epic. [pg. 25-26]

The French academy in Rome was a small institution . . . . the number of students rose to twenty during the nineteenth century. The students passed their time copying works in the Vatican and other palaces, for one of the tasks of the director was to secure casts and copies of notable works and actual antiques for the academy and palaces of France. J. M. Vien, the master of David and the founder of the severe Classical school, appointed in 1775, was probably the most influential director, though J. A. D. Ingres, the pioneer of modern draughtsmanship, appointed in 1834, must run him close for the honour.

After the fall of the French monarchy in 1792, the direction of French art was taken over by Jacques Louis David, a member of the Convention who expressed his gratitude for the royal grant he had received for study in Rome by voting for the removal of his monarch's head. In 1795 David reconstituted the academy as the AcadÚmie des Beaux Arts, a title to which, off and on, the adjective Royale was added or subtracted, according to whether the French enthroned or dethroned a monarch. David's influence was paramount until the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, and it was during this period of severe classical art that academic art education most exactly fitted the artists' finished subjects. Depictions of Classical epics suited both the republican idealists and the imperial Napoleon.

The decay of the Classical academic spirit was ensured by the Romantic movement, stimulated by the writings of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, and the paintings of Gericault and Vernet. Classical art was reburied under an avalanche of deaths in battle, by poison, deathbeds, murders, sacks, massacres, sacrifices, flights, incarcerations, deluges, wrecks, retreats, storms, and other disasters dear to the romantic soul. As Thackeray put it, "Andromache may weep: but her spouse is beyond the reach of physic . . . . Classicism is dead.' [18]

. . . . but a high standard of drawing was maintained at the École des Beaux Arts, the school of the Acadé'mie, due to the teachings of Ingres who was professor there in the fifties. In 1863 control of this school was removed from the Acadé'mie, and the number of candidates for entrance was so great that in the seventies, in addition to stiff entrance, examinations in perspective, anatomy, design, and life drawing, which occupied nearly four weeks, history and other written subjects in French were introduced, aimed only at excluding the large number of British students, who were attracted by the superiority of the drawing there to that at the Royal Academy Schools. [p. 27]

The academies of Europe were now taking the Beaux Arts as their model. Walter Shaw Sparrow gave a vivid description of the Acadé'mie des Beaux Arts in Brussels in his autobiography, [20] with its Room for the Torso Antigue dominated by the Venus de Milo under a stream of gaslight, the Room for the Head Antique, and the Room for the Figure Antique . . . . 'A door from the Figure Antigue led to that holy of holies, the Life Class, guarded by stiff examination.' . . . . the students hired plaster casts for use in their lodgings, drawing immense hands, feet, and eyes 'a yard long and more, constructing them angularly'. This angular drawing was the French method of 'drawing square' from point to point, as opposed to the British soft fudging within hard outlines. The advanced students drew heads, torsos, and whole figures in conté crayon, painted torsos in oil, and occasional full figure studies on canvases eight foot high. This was varied with oil painting from casts of the antique. Sparrow remarked, 'There were delightful tints in the dust.' The Brussels students were also encouraged, like those in France, to draw rapid sketches of people in the streets [croquis ], and quick colour compositions [pochades ] . . . . [p. 27]

London
The first British academy of art appears to have been the Academy of Painting established in 1711 by Sir Godfrey Kneller in Queen Street, London, a rather strange circumstance as the German held the opinion that 'God Almighty only made painters . . . . one of his students, William Hogarth . . . . organized an academy in St. Martins' Lane, a completely democratic institution which provided life models for the use of its members. Both the Dilettanti Society and the St. Martin's Lane Academy prepared plans for a royal academy . . . . on 10 December 1768 the Instrument of foundation was signed by the monarch, establishing the 'Royal Academy of arts in London.' [Hodgson, J. E., and Eaton, F. A. The Royal Academy and its Members John Murray, London, 1905 [p. 345]] [p. 28] [William Chambers with Joshua Reynolds put the scheme to George III] [pp. 27-28]

. . . . 'the said Society shall consist of forty Members only, who shall be called Academicians of the Royal Academy; they shall all of them be artists by profession at the time of their admission'. It stipulated, amongst other things, that the academy should be governed by a council consisting of an elected president and eight other persons, and that an annual exhibition of paintings should be held, but it is the provision of art education which concerns us here. [p. 28]

The schools of Design of the Royal Academy were established by the Instrument, which instructed: 'IX. That the Schools of Design may be under the direction of the ablest Artists, there shall be elected annually from amongst the Academicians nine persons, who shall be called Visitors; they shall be Painters of History, able Sculptors, or other persons properly qualified; their business shall be, to attend the Schools by rotation, each a month , to set the figures, to examine the performances of the Students, to advise and instruct them, to endeavor to form their taste, and turn their attention towards that branch of the Arts for which they shall seem to have the aptest disposition.' [Hodgson, J. E., and Eaton, F. A. The Royal Academy and its Members John Murray, London, 1905 ] [pg. 28]

There were also to be elected Professors of anatomy, architecture, perspective and geometry, and painting, who were to read annually six public lectures in the Schools . . . . The schools were opened in 1769 in Pall Mall, but in 1771 the King granted accommodation in the old palace at Somerset House. Later the Schools moved into the new palace, remaining there until 1836, when they were housed in the east wing of the National Gallery. In 1867 the Government granted the Academy possession of its present home, Burlington House, and shortly afterwards the Schools were established in the basement, a place of gloom, according to George Leslie, 'which not even the chatter of the pretty girls in their white pinafores can dispel'. [p. 29]

To gain entrance to the Schools, drawings had to be submitted to the Council, the required exercises varying only slightly throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . . [p. 29]

. . . . Royal Academy students, who had spent five or more years in tedious imitation, were shocked to behold the fluent and constructive drawings of young men returning after spending only two or three years in Paris. During the [18]eighties and nineties, under the presidencies of Leighton and Poynter, the organization of the Academy was greatly improved, but students were aware of these great men's foreign training and of their belief in the superiority of French drawing methods . . . . [p. 30]

The United States
The first phase of America's art education had followed swiftly upon developments in London. From the year 1764, four years before the foundation of the Royal Academy, young men had crossed the Atlantic to work in the studio of Benjamin West. These disciples of the Pennsylvanian protÚgÚ of George III included Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, John Trumbull, William Dunlap, Washington Alston and Samuel Morse, a military and inventive group, inventive not only in art but also in the sciences, men who were to found the first academies in their home country. [p. 31]

Philadelphia's claim to have the senior art institution in the United States rests upon the foundation of an academy in that city initiated by Willson Peale's establishment of the Columbianum in 1794. The academy, which exhibited in Independence Hall in the following year was deeply divided by social and political altercations and lay moribund until its reorganization as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1807. Peale, a pupil of West from 1767 to 1770, soldier, and pioneer of museum display, paleontology, prosthetic dentistry, and gaslighting, was a foundation member of the Academy and the chief author of its activities until his death in 1827. [National Cyclopaedia of American Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Encyclopedia Britannica]

New York established its Academy of Fine Arts in 1802 and it was Colonel John Trumbell, late aide-de-camp of George Washington, who was the moving spirit in its early development. A pupil of West from 1780 to 1784, Trumbull succeeded as a painter of prominent men and historic events carried out in his master's style. His important works such as his portrait of Washington and his 'Declaration of Independence', gave him the statute to be appointed president of the Academy in 1820, but his dictatorial methods caused Samuel Morse to set up the rival National Academy of Design in 1826, an academy more liberal in outlook and determined to extend art education to young students. This academy, which Morse based on its London counterpart, was governed by artists, unlike its rival which the Colonel ran with the assistance of prominent citizens, but public interest was low, and unfortunately for the progress of public art education, from 1830 onwards Morse became more preoccupied with the dot-dash-space technique than with artists communication. In 1834, William Dunlap wrote an interesting account of those early days of American art education, entitled A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, [Dunlap, William A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in The United States Scott, New York, 1834]] [p. 32]

. . . . Eakins made an impact as an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he was appointed director of the school in 1879, by laying stress upon anatomy and drawing from the nude. His serious course of study was very much appreciated by the students, but the parents . . . . were disturbed, especially by the mixed life classes in the atelier tradition . . . . the simple natural poses which Eakins insisted upon, rather than the fashionable sentimental and exotic postures, also gave offence . . . . Moreover, Eakins was a pioneer of photography from the nude, and introduced Eadweard Muybridge, the English photographer, into the Academy to take his famous experimental series of photographs of 'human locomotion from the nude. [Lacy, P., and La Rotonda, A. A History of the Nude in Photography Bantam Books, New York, 1964 [pp. 34-5]] [p. 32-33]

The academies were now set upon the same path as their European counterparts . . . . In them many single ladies pursued art as an accomplishment, but the academies were not looked upon as the means of disseminating art training to the general public or to children . . . . [p. 33]

Elementary Schools
The elementary schools, referred to in this book as public day schools, comprised the national and parochial schools, usually referred to in Government documents of that time as 'schools for the poor'. From 1852, boys and girls in public day schools in the London area were taught drawing from a Government syllabus, and by 1854 the subject was being taken throughout the country as a result of the recommendation of the Committee of Council on Education that Training College students and pupil-teachers should study and teach drawing, and be tested by examinations set by the Science and Art department of the board of Trade. [Minutes of Committee of Council on Education, 1856-7 [p. 25]; Minute of 24 February 1857 [para. 8]] [p. 166]

. . . . The Primary or First grade course for schools was strictly utilitarian and stated with linear geometry and perspective, then continued with outlines of simple objects from the flat copy. After this the children were allowed to copy solid geometrical shapes, and then returned to the flat copy to draw outlines of the human figure and animals. The final achievement was drawing flowers in outline and painting them, both from flat copies. [p. 167]

Six casts of classical ornament usually gathered dust, pegged to the classroom walls, while the busts of Diana and the young Augustus stared with sightless eyes from the top of a press upon the plebeians below. These casts, recommended by the Department for schools, were intended rather to instill an appreciation of art and ornament, than for any practical purpose. The First Grade course did not include such ambitious drawing from the round and even the figure and flower stages were rarely attained - firstly, because the pupils were kept practising the exercises required for the First Grade examinations, on the results of which the teachers received payments; and secondly, because they were instructed by the inspectors that drawing must not veer toward fine art. [p. 167]

The First Grade examinations consisted of four papers of a purely mechanical nature:

a) Freehand: Outline in pencil from a flat example of ornament,
b) Model: Outline of a geometrical solid, such as a cube.
c) Memory: Outline from memory of a common object.
d) Linear Geometry: Some easy problems in practical geometry

Even the freehand paper was mainly mechanical, as it was a formal elevation, not a true view of the ornament . . . . [p. 167]

The Exercises were taught by certificated schoolmasters and pupil-teachers . . . . they simply visited the schools and supervised the type of instruction given. The Birmingham School of Art Committee remarked: "This connection is of the very slightest nature and consists in the occasional visit of an Art Master to each of the schools in questions.' [Minutes Book of Birmingham School of Art and Society of Arts: Annual Report for 1863-4 pasted in book] Walter Smith, head at Leeds and the most successful propagator of Cole's system to parochial schools, did his task so well that by 1864 over 5,000 pupils were being taught in connection with his school, and it could claim payments for the employment of five local scholars [art pupil-teachers]. [p. 167]