Late 19th Century Academic Painting
(To see a larger image of the paintings below and to obtain more information about the painter and the painting click on the titles.)

   By the middle of the 19th century the domination of painting by the official academies in  Western and Central Europe had produced an art that was highly refined and, from the point of view of most 20th century critics, somewhat sterile. Working within this system young artists competed for the favor of older painters in competitions for awards, such as the high prestigious Prix de Rome, and for the right to exhibit their works in the annual Salons, which not only provided artists with the opportunity to find buyers for their work but also gave their work an semi-official stamp of approval.
      The focus on technique does not, however, indicate that these artists were merely interested in accurately reproducing physical reality.  They believed that art could be a privileged route to a deeper truth and should be morally uplifting.  Only a limited number of subjects (genres) were considered worthy vehicles for such high themes.

  Thus, academic artists painted themes borrowed from religion, classical mythology, and history.  Scenes of landscapes or (worse) of everyday moments in 19th century life were considered too insignificant to be the subject of great art.   From our perspectives many of the paintings of the period seem quite explicitly erotic and often degrading to women, but within the world of official painting at the time it was believed that they were uplifting examples of pure beauty.

Acceptance within this system rested largely on the ability to master the demanding technical requirements of the “realistic” style dominant at the time.  Painters were expected to create the impression that their work


Théodore Chassériau (1819-56) The Tepidarium (1853)

 

Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus”, 1863

was a “window” onto a particular scene.  All signs of their brush strokes were to be hidden, and the use of foreshortening and subtle shading was to create the illusion of three dimensional space.  In following such techniques artists believed that they were continuing a tradition that stretched back to ancient Greece and rediscovering the same ideals of beauty that had inspired Western art throughout history.

 View some of the examples of nineteenth century French academic realism on this page or elsewhere on the site and ask yourself the following questions:  

1) What do the choices of subject matter or the nature of the style of such paintings tell us about the ideals of what art should be that were dominant in the official art of this period?

2) What about the ways that the art world was organized may have contributed to this notion of what art should be?

 

Adolphe-William Bouguereau,
Nymphs and Satyr 1873