Academic Art and Paintings

Academic art means painting made to the official standards and principles of taste of the European and American art academies, as the Getty's art vocabulary defines it. The National Gallery in London says the art the academies promoted looked to ancient art and to classical painters such as Raphael, and that history painting was regarded as its highest form. The style is also called academicism or academism, and its great age was the mid to late 19th century, when success at the Paris Salon could make a painter's career.

Sources: Getty AAT: academic art · National Gallery: Art academies (glossary) · National Gallery: The Salon (glossary) · Tate Etc: The nude stripped bare · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture)

Academic paintings are carefully drawn, smoothly finished pictures of serious subjects: history, myth, the Bible and the idealized nude. The Clark Art Institute describes Bouguereau's finish as smooth to the point that the brushstrokes are almost invisible, a manner critics of the time called léché, “licked,” and says such big pictures were prepared through many drawings and a painted study, as taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. The Musée d'Orsay describes Gérôme's Neo-Grec style as a taste for meticulous finish, pale colors and smooth brushwork.

Sources: Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33 · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · National Gallery: Art academies (glossary)

Academic art was at its height in the mid to late 19th century, when, the Musée d'Orsay says, the Paris Salon was the one exhibition, both popular and official, where artists could make their work known. The academies themselves were much older: the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded in 1648. By the mid-19th century, Tate says, they had become highly conservative and used their hold on the big exhibitions to resist naturalism, realism and Impressionism, so artists set up other exhibitions and private galleries, and “academic” came to mean conservative or old-fashioned.

Sources: Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Tate: Academy

The best-known academic painters were the Frenchmen William Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston calls Bouguereau the quintessential successful academic painter; Cabanel's The Birth of Venus was one of the great successes of the Salon of 1863, where Napoleon III bought it; and Gérôme, a pupil of the academic painter Paul Delaroche, made a brilliant debut at the Salon of 1847, the Musée d'Orsay says. Thomas Couture, Jules Lefebvre and Édouard Detaille also built careers at the Salon, while Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted the royal courts of Europe.

Sources: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Google Arts & Culture) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · National Gallery of Victoria (Google Arts & Culture) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Museo Napoleonico, Rome (Google Arts & Culture)

French academic art is the painting taught and rewarded by France's official art institutions: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 and renamed the Académie des Beaux-Arts after the Revolution, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where painters such as Bouguereau trained, and the Salon. Young painters competed for the Prix de Rome, which opened the doors of the Villa Medici in Rome; Bouguereau failed to win it in 1848 and 1849, the Musée d'Orsay says. Acclaim at the Salon then mattered most of all for a painter's career, according to the National Gallery in London.

Sources: Tate: Academy · Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33 · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · National Gallery: The Salon (glossary)

The Salon was the official art exhibition in Paris, organized by the French Royal Academy and its successor, the Académie des Beaux-Arts. From 1725 it was held in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, which gave it its name, Tate says. By about 1860 so many artists were being turned away that in 1863 the government set up a separate Salon des Refusés for them. The Musée d'Orsay notes that the Salon, long seen as the home of academic art, in fact let very different kinds of painting compete.

Sources: Tate: Salon · National Gallery: The Salon (glossary) · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture)

Myth and ancient history gave academic painters a respectable reason to paint the idealized nude. The Musée d'Orsay says that in Cabanel's The Birth of Venus the mythological theme is simply a pretext for the portrayal of a nude figure, and the Clark Art Institute notes that Bouguereau's name was synonymous with voluptuous female nudes, and that his Nymphs and Satyr was made acceptable by its classical subject and its academic stamp of approval. When Manet's Olympia showed a modern woman instead of a goddess at the Salon of 1865, Tate's magazine recalls, it shocked the public.

Sources: Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33 · Tate Etc: The nude stripped bare

Academic painters worked in the studio and finished their pictures to a smooth, polished surface; the Impressionists painted out of doors, quickly, in separate dabs of color, to catch the changing effects of light. Academic art was made for the official Salon, while the Impressionists held their own group exhibitions in Paris from 1874 to 1886, Tate says. By then, according to Tate, the academies were using their monopoly of the big exhibitions to resist Impressionism and the movements that followed it.

Sources: Tate: Impressionism · Tate: Academy · Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33

Neoclassicism was, as Tate puts it, a particularly pure form of classicism that emerged from about 1750; academic art is the official style of the academies that grew out of that classical teaching and filled the Salons of the mid to late 19th century. Late academic painters mixed their sources freely: the Musée d'Orsay says Cabanel's The Birth of Venus combines references to Ingres with an 18th-century style of painting, in an eclectic spirit typical of the Second Empire. Both looked back to antiquity and to Raphael.

Sources: Tate: Neoclassicism · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture) · National Gallery: Art academies (glossary)

History painting is a picture with a serious story taken from the Bible, mythology, literature or the past, and the academies placed it above every other kind of painting. The National Gallery in London calls it the climax of an academic painter's training and the equivalent of epic or tragedy in literature, and Tate says the style thought right for it was the classical, idealized “grand style.” Couture's The Romans of the Decadence, which the Musée d'Orsay calls a history painting meant to carry a moral message, is a famous example.

Sources: National Gallery: History paintings (glossary) · Tate: History painting · Musée d'Orsay (Google Arts & Culture)

Academic art fell out of favor because the academies grew conservative and tried to shut out new art: Tate says they resisted naturalism, realism and Impressionism until artists bypassed them with their own exhibitions and dealers, and “academic” came to mean old-fashioned. Critics also attacked its polish; the Clark Art Institute quotes complaints about Bouguereau's “stereotyped suavity” and his avoidance of real life. Its reputation has since recovered, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston says Bouguereau's fame has been rekindled of late.

Sources: Tate: Academy · Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33 · Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Google Arts & Culture)

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds both Births of Venus, by Bouguereau and Cabanel, Bouguereau's Dante and Virgil, Couture's The Romans of the Decadence, Detaille's The Dream and Gervex's A Session of the Painting Jury. In the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has Madame X, The Storm, Lady with the Rose and Florinda, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has Nymphs and Satyr, and the Phoenix Art Museum has Pollice Verso. Matejko's Battle of Grunwald is in the National Museum in Warsaw.

Sources: Musée d'Orsay · Musée d'Orsay · Musée d'Orsay · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Clark Art Institute: Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, cat. 33 · Phoenix Art Museum · National Museum in Warsaw (Google Arts & Culture)

Yes. Every painter on this page died by 1929, so their paintings are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain