The French Academy of Art

Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.5-7.

  In the middle ages painters had been considered craftsmen, and, like the weavers of

Nicolas Poussin, The dance to the music of time (1620)
 cloth or furniture, they organized them selves into guilds that trained new apprentices and controlled prices, methods of production, and who was allowed to produce goods. In the 17th century, under the influence of the Italian Renaissance, those in the "fine" arts, like painters or scultors, began to be seen as more elevated and spritual than those who made goods for everyday life. In keeping with this new status, they convinced the French king to create a Royal Academy that would control the production of art in exchange for supporting the monarchy. This organization continued to dominate the French art world through the first half of the 19th century and continued to have great influence until the beginning of  the twentieth.
   In the passage below sociologists, Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, describe how the Academy controlled the system of professional institutions and rewards that shaped the career of artists such as Gérôme's time.

 ARTIST AS LEARNED MAN: TRIUMPH  OF  THE ROYAL  ACADEMY

  In  consolidating its  monopoly of  privilege, the  Academy also emphasized a new conception of the artist: no longer an artisan or a low-caste hawker of wares, he was instead a learned man, a teacher of the high principles of beauty and taste. Under Charles Lebrun as rector, the Academy obtained the monopoly on the teaching of drawing "from  life," expanded its membership by forcing all "free" painters and brevetaires into its organization, and laid down the ideological framework --  a rigid hierarchy of subject matter by cultural  importance, a definition of "correct" style and a program of training to inculcate it -- that was to persist as the basis of the Academic system.

Palace of Fine Arts at the 1855 International Exhibition in Paris

GOVERNMENT PATRONAGE AND  THE NEW  ELITE

With its new establishment the Academy  had elevated the painter to a higher social position than ever before.  Not only did  it bestow the status of learned man, an equal of the philosophers and men of letters of the  other sections of the Institut; but also the Academy was a relatively independent part of the state bureaucracy, and its members were in a position qualitatively very different from that of even the most esteemed court painter, who was, after all, just a higher type of servant. As an example for  all to see of  what a painter could   attain, it  was an undoubted  influence upon the status of all artists. Painting was becoming a profession in  the middle-class sense. Methods of advancement in  the  Ecole des Beaux-Arts [the official French art school] were as prescribed in  principle as those of St.-Cyr [the French military academy] .Comforted by this, bourgeois fathers became more willing to send their sons through this official painting system where application and perseverance would produce a publicly discernible record of advancement.