Academic art
United States

The influence of the Royal Academy extended across the ocean and strongly determined the foundation and direction of American art from the end of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century, when the country began to establish its cultural independence. Some of the leading local artists studied in London under the guidance of the Royal Academy and others, who settled in England, continued to exert influence in their home country through regular submissions of works of art. This was the case with John Singleton Copley, the dominant influence in his country until the beginning of the 19th century, and also with Benjamin West, who became one of the leaders of the English neoclassical-romantic movement and one of the main European names of his generation in the field of history painting. He made a number of fellow disciples, such as Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, and his influence was similar to that of Copley on American painting.

The first academy to be created in the United States was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1805 and still active today. The initiative came from the painter Charles Peale and the sculptor William Rush, along with other artists and traders. Its progress was slow, and its peak was only reached at the end of the 19th century, when it began to receive significant financial support, opened a gallery and formed its own collection, becoming an anti-modernist bastion. The most decisive step toward the formation of an American academic culture was taken when the National Academy of Design was founded in 1826 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and other artists dissatisfied with the orientation of the Pennsylvania Academy. It soon became the most respected artistic institution in the country. Its method followed the traditional academic model, focusing on drawing from classical and live models, in addition to offering lectures on anatomy, perspective, history and mythology, among other subjects. Cole and Durand were also the founders of the Hudson River School, an aesthetic movement that began a great painting tradition, lasting for three generations, with a remarkable unity of principles, and which presented the national landscape in an epic, idealistic and sometimes fanciful light. Its members included Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, the most celebrated landscape painters of their generation.

In the field of sculpture, however, the greatest influence came from the Italian academies, especially through the example of Antonio Canova, who was the main figure of European neoclassicism, educated in part at the Venice Academy and in Rome. Italy offered a historical and cultural backdrop of irresistible interest to sculptors, with priceless monuments, ruins and collections, and working conditions were infinitely superior to those of the New World, where there was a shortage of both marble and capable assistants to help the artist in the complex and laborious art of stone carving and bronze casting. Horatio Greenough was just the first in a large wave of Americans to settle between Rome and Florence. The most notable of these was William Wetmore Story, who after 1857 assumed leadership of the American colony that had been created in Rome, becoming a reference for all newcomers. Despite their stay in Italy, the group continued to be celebrated in their country, and their artistic achievements received continuous press coverage until the neoclassical vogue dissipated in North America from the 1870s onwards. By this time, the United States had already established its culture and created the general conditions to promote consistent and high-level local sculptural production, adopting an eclectic synthesis of styles. These sculptors also strongly absorbed the influence of the French Académie, several of them were educated there, and their production populated most public spaces and the facades of major American buildings, with works of strong civic and great formalism that became icons of local culture, such as the statue of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French and the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

In 1875, the Art Students League took over as the leading American art academy, founded by students inspired by the model of the French Académie, establishing the guidelines for national art education until World War II, while also opening its classes to women. Offering better working conditions than its Parisian model, the League was created by artists who saw in the French academic environment an appeal to culture and civilization and believed that this model would discipline the national democratic impulse, transcending regionalisms and social differences, refine the taste of capitalists and contribute to elevating society and improving its culture.
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