Public and private art education in France, 1648-1793
Abstract
This study looks at two public and three private approaches to art instruction in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and discusses the art education they offered in the context of the period's changing perceptions of art, the artist, and the artisan. The two public institutions presented are the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648-1793), supported by the Crown; and the many provincial drawing schools supported by local and regional governments. The three private approaches are apprenticeship; the Academie de Saint-Luc (1649-1650, 1705-1776), underwritten by the guild of painters and sculptors; and the Ecole Royale Gratuite de Dessin (1766-1793), funded by private benefactors. In 1648, the year in which the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was founded, most art education was familial, individualized, private in both funding and sponsorship, and devoted to the techniques of the fine and decorative arts. In 1793, the year the Academie Royale was dissolved, the audience for education had broadened; schools funded by state or local government had assumed much, if not all, of the country's art education; and most programs addressed skills useful to industry and the State rather than the cultivation of the fine arts. In other words, three trends may be discerned in the art education of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. It moved from the family to the institution, from private to public support, and from the fine to the applied arts. These trends, especially clear in the public art education of the provinces, reflected the increased recognition of commerce, the trades, and the worker promoted by the Philosophes and the Encyclopedie. While the noted art educators of the time have never been numbered among the Philosophes, in their concern for the condition of working men, and in the actions they took to improve it, they embodied the best of the philosophic principles that were the Enlightenment.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Foley, Purdue University.
Subject Area
European history|Art education|Education history
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