How painting was actually taught
Every painter in the atlas was trained by a system: a bottega, a guild, an academy, an atelier. Those systems had admission rules, set exercises with set durations, models on schedules, fees, competitions, and doctrines, and they are documented in treatises, memoirs, and institutional records. This atlas reconstructs them, school by school, from those sources.
The arc runs from the Renaissance workshop, where a boy ground pigments for years before touching a brush, through the guilds and the great state academies, to the private ateliers that trained the moderns, and it ends at the question painters still ask today: atelier or online.
The Florentine Bottega
The workshop that made painters by contract: a boy of ten ground pigments for years, earned drawing, earned paint, and left only when his own masterpiece satisfied the guild.
The First Academies
Where art education left the guild: Vasari's academy put geometry lectures and dissections beside the drawing bench in 1563, and the Carracci ran a house where students drew day and night and the correction was Annibale doing it better in front of you.
The Guild of Saint Luke
Painter training as market regulation: contracts at ten, the master owning every stroke you made, and a masterpiece judged by the guild before you could sign your own name in your own city.
Pacheco's Seville Workshop
The workshop that wrote itself down: live-in apprenticeship under contract, drawing as the law, a hired peasant boy posed crying and laughing, and the master's own treatise as the record.
École des Beaux-Arts
The French state system where competition decided everything: entry by exam, rank deciding your seat in the life room, and the Prix de Rome as the summit of a ladder made entirely of concours.
Imperial Academy of Arts
The total institution of art education: boys entered at eight, boarded on cabbage soup, climbed a ladder of medals for up to fifteen years, and the Large Gold Medal bought a locked-cell masterpiece and years in Rome.
The Royal Academy Schools
Free tuition, an ivory ticket, and a decade of chalk: the English academy where probationers proved themselves unaided, the Antique earned the Life room, and nobody ever graduated, they just won December medals.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
America's first art school, and free for seventy years, then remade in one decade by Eakins: casts called imitations of imitations, and a dissection room with a lion.
The Munich Academy
The class-ladder academy of the German world: casts to life to technique to composition to a master's studio, seven Marks a year for men, and a separate 400-Mark academy the excluded women built for themselves.
The Académie Suisse
A room over the Quai des Orfèvres where ten francs a month bought a live model and nothing else: no teacher, no exam, no correction. Monet met Pissarro here.
The Düsseldorf Academy
The Prussian ladder with a market attached: under one in ten admitted, four rungs from copying plates to a studio of your own, and a Kunstverein selling the students' pictures before they graduated.
The National Academy of Design
Free by charter, paid for out of twenty-five-cent exhibition tickets, and closed in 1875 when charging for lessons turned out to break the charter that made it free.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago's ladder ran from lithographic copy plates to painting the figure, mornings on academic practice, afternoons on the trades, and Vanderpoel telling students they were only dirtying the paper.
Académie Julian
The open-door Paris atelier where anyone who paid could draw from life: no entrance exam, women trained to the same curriculum as men, and the concours ran the room.
Académie Colarossi
The Montparnasse atelier where women paid the same fee as men, drew the same nude model, and the evening sketch class ran a pose down from an hour to a single minute.
The Slade School of Fine Art
Living model first and antique cast second, women in the life room beside men from 1871, and a former surgeon teaching that a bad drawing was like living with a lie.
Art Students League of New York
The student-governed league with no curriculum at all: autonomous studios, monthly enrollment open to anyone, and each teacher a law unto themselves, which is exactly how it trained a century of American painting.
The Brandywine School
The illustration school Howard Pyle ran without charging tuition, admitting twelve of five hundred by portfolio, teaching composition and mental projection before technique, and goading students to live inside the picture.
The New York School of Art
The school Chase built with students who seceded from the Art Students League, where he painted market fish before the class, until Robert Henri's art for life's sake pulled the room away.
The Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Two women opened a Montparnasse studio in 1904 where you paid by the session, drew the model, and took correction only if you asked. It still sells sessions.
The Atelier Revival
The living line from Gammell's Boston atelier to today's schools: a cast-to-life ladder from Bargue plates through charcoal casts to the figure, sight-size measured against the model, and a master who charged no fees and covered his students' rent.
The teachers behind these systems have their own pages in the Painter Atlas: Bridgman, Vanderpoel, Chistyakov, Bargue, Hale, and the rest of the education wing. The transmission lines between them are mapped in the lineage graph and drawn across five centuries in the Teaching Line.