Realities of Training

Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.26.

As you read this description of the ways that an increase in the number of artists strained the Academy's system, think about how these changes might have resulted in mnore freedom for innovation in the arts.

For  the  bulk  of aspiring artists the system of training was by no means smooth and tightly knit. As the  flow of students increased during the  nineteeth century, the  Ecole and  associated  ateliers had  to adapt to numbers larger than they  had been  conceived to handle. The rote copying method of  teaching, the mainstay of a beginner's training in  the  Ecole, could easily be extended to large classes, as could the atelier system where  the master  appeared once a week. But the larger the  class, the less individual attention and the less thorough the indoctrination. Teaching at  the Ecole was under constant fire from all  sides;  the liberals claimed it stifled creativity with  its  dull, exact reproductions of an infinitude of plaster casts;  the  conservatives claimed  that   it had  degenerated into an  undisciplined, superficial training which produced, at best, facile copyists and no artists "in  the great  tradition of French painting."

New  informal "schools" sprang up to take advantage of the growing numbers. For those who failed the entrance exam at the Ecole or did not have the money to enter a private atelier, there were the "free" academies which  provided nothing but  a studio and a model, where  anyone might pay the small model fee and drop in to work a while.  The Academie Suisse, run by a former model, and the Academie  julien, whose proprietor took a personal interest in "students" like Gauguin, were the  two best known.

Thus official supervision became more and more cursory for  the bulk  of the students and  alternatives to official training appeared. The twin  results were half-trained artists and undamped sparks of  novelty in the  better students: Courbet serves as perhaps the most vivid  example.