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 Académie Suisse was not a school in any ordinary sense. It was a rented second-floor room at 4 Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité, opened in 1815 by Martin François Suisse, a former baker's apprentice who made his living as an artist's model and posed for Jacques-Louis David some thirty-nine times. For about ten francs a month, twenty-five by 1850, anyone could take a stool and work from a live model. There was no entrance examination, no curriculum, no competition, and no correction of the work. What the room supplied instead was the other painters on the benches. Courbet drew there in the early 1840s, Manet while he was still under Couture, and Monet met Camille Pissarro there around 1859. Pissarro found Cézanne at those easels in 1861. The studio passed to Suisse's nephew, then to Crébassol, and was sold in 1879 to Filippo Colarossi.
How the system worked
None. Pay the month and take a stool. No entrance examination, no portfolio, no character reference, and no French-language requirement, at a time when the École des Beaux-Arts gated entry behind a competitive concours conducted in French. Painters who fell behind on the fee left drawings against the debt, and the drawings stayed up on the walls.
One large room on the second floor of a building at the corner of the Quai des Orfèvres and the Boulevard du Palais, reached by worn stairs and dark corridors. Inside, an amphitheatre of about eighty stools and benches faced the model's platform. One proprietor, no faculty, no enrolled classes. The pooled monthly fees paid for the model and the room, so model time was the only thing the studio actually sold.
None, and none was offered. Painters used the room for whatever they happened to lack. Some were drilling from the figure before sitting other schools' entrance examinations, some were already working professionals who wanted cheap model hours, and some had been refused or priced out everywhere else. Advancement was whatever each painter decided it was.
None. No concours, no medals, no ranking, no wall of prize studies. Writing to Cézanne about the Paris studios, Zola described the arrangement plainly: students worked there without their studies being corrected. The only judgment on offer came from whoever was sitting at the next stool, which in the early 1860s could be Pissarro.
Two sessions a day. The Cézanne literature gives the studio's hours as eight in the morning until one, and seven until ten at night. Zola's letters of 1861 place Cézanne at the Suisse in the mornings, with his afternoons spent working alongside the painter Villevieille. The long evening session is what made the room usable by painters who had daytime obligations elsewhere.
None, and that absence was the product. Suisse had been a drawing-master himself and would advise on how to set the pose, and he told stories about the painters he had modelled for, so the room was not silent. But nobody walked the easels to mark the work, and nothing anyone made there was ever graded.
About ten francs a month, among the cheapest rates in Paris. Zola quotes that exact figure to Cézanne when comparing the city's studios, and a French account of 1831 calls it a derisory sum for a place to work and the services of a model. By 1850 the monthly rate is given as twenty-five francs. Set against the 150 francs a month Cézanne had from his father, a month at the Suisse cost roughly what a few dinners did.
The curriculum, in training order
The single continuous exercise, repeated for sixty-four years: drawing and painting from the living figure, male and female models both, from a stool in the amphitheatre facing the platform. No set problems, no named studies, no sequence to work through.
A morning session and an evening session, which let painters bolt the Suisse onto whatever else they were doing. Manet drew here in the 1850s while training under Thomas Couture and copying in the Louvre; Cézanne worked here in the mornings of 1861 and painted with Villevieille in the afternoons.
The part nobody scheduled and the reason the room matters. Monet met Pissarro here around 1859. In 1861 Pissarro and Francisco Oller found Cézanne at these easels, where his studies were being laughed at by the other students, and Pissarro backed him anyway.
The friendships that produced the 1874 exhibition were made on these benches.
Materials, models, and the room
- The room. A rented apartment on the second floor of the building at 4 Quai des Orfèvres. Contemporary description calls the studio unattractive to look at: worn stairs, sombre corridors, nicotine-stained walls, an amphitheatre of eighty stools and benches, and a platform for the model. It filled and emptied with the season.
- A quinquet with twenty lamps. The evening session ran on oil. The room was lit by a quinquet, an Argand-type oil lamp, carrying twenty burners, which the same description calls fairly good light. The gas lighting sometimes assumed for the evening classes is not what the sources record.
- Whatever the painter carried in. No prescribed media, no house method, no supplied materials, no casts. Charcoal, chalk, or oil, according to each painter's own practice. The studio provided the model, the stool, the light, and the heat, and stopped there.
- The models. Professional models, paid out of the pooled monthly fees rather than salaried. Marie-Hortense Fiquet worked as a model here part-time, her main trade being bookselling or bookbinding, and met Cézanne at the studio in 1869; she later became his wife.
- The drawings on the walls. Students who could not pay a month settled it in work, and the studies they left stayed hanging. The walls of the room were an accidental archive of everyone who had been too broke to cover the fee.
The people
Who taught
Martin François Suisse · founder and proprietor, 1815 to 1858
A baker's apprentice who became a professional artist's model, posing for Jacques-Louis David some thirty-nine times between 1811 and 1815. He had trained as a drawing-master and would advise on setting the pose, but he taught no classes and corrected no work. He understood the one thing painters cannot supply for themselves, which is a model on a schedule, and he sold exactly that.
Charles Alexandre Suisse · proprietor, 1858 to 1871
The nephew who took the studio on when Suisse retired, and the reason the school is often called the Académie de Charles Suisse. He kept the arrangement and the price unchanged.
Étienne Prosper Crébassol · proprietor, 1871 to 1879
The painter who ran it as the Académie Suisse-Crébassol, then sold the studio to Filippo Colarossi in 1879. What Colarossi built on it became the Académie Colarossi.
Who trained here
Gustave Courbet · early 1840s
Drew here as a young man, outside every academy he had no use for. Twenty years later he painted the portrait of the founder, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is most of the reason we know what Suisse looked like.
Édouard Manet · 1850s
Worked from the model here during the six years he spent in Thomas Couture's studio, using the Suisse and the Louvre to get what Couture's teaching was not giving him.
Carolus-Duran · 1859 to 1861
Two solid years at the Suisse before the career that would make him Sargent's teacher. The open studio sits directly upstream of the Carolus-Duran method.
Claude Monet · c. 1859-60
Took model time here before Gleyre's studio, and met Camille Pissarro at the Suisse. That acquaintance is the first thread of the group that exhibited together in 1874.
Camille Pissarro · from c. 1859
The room's connective figure. He met Monet here, found Cézanne here, and defended Cézanne's work when the other students mocked it. Half of Impressionism was introduced to the other half at these easels.
Paul Cézanne · from 1861, and again later
Arrived from Aix in 1861 and worked the morning session. His studies were the joke of the room until Pissarro took him seriously. He met Hortense Fiquet, then a model at the studio, here in 1869.
Armand Guillaumin · 1860s
The third of the Suisse group with Cézanne and Pissarro, and the one who kept a day job through it.
Francisco Oller · 1860s
The Puerto Rican painter who was with Pissarro the day they went to look at Cézanne's work in 1861.
Eugène Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, Cabanel and others · dates not documented
The studio's attendee roster is long and reaches back to the Romantic generation, but for most of these names no dates and no independent record of attendance survive. They are listed here as the roster lists them, not as documented enrolments.
The primary record
- Émile Zola, letters to Paul Cézanne (1860), urging him to Paris and costing out the studios: Suisse's is one of the cheapest at about ten francs, and students there work "sans que leurs études soient corrigées" ("without their studies being corrected").. The best single source on both the fee and the absence of teaching. Translation machine-assisted from the French.
- Émile Zola, letter of June 1861 on Cézanne's Paris routine: "Le matin, Paul va chez Suisse" ("In the morning, Paul goes to Suisse's").. Contemporary confirmation of Cézanne's attendance and of the morning session.
- Camille Pissarro, letter to his son Lucien, recalling that in 1861 he and Oller went to see Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, where the other students treated his studies as a laughing stock.. The founding anecdote of the Cézanne and Pissarro friendship, from one of the two people present.
- Gustave Courbet, Monsieur Suisse (1861), oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 29.100.120, H. O. Havemeyer Collection. A posthumous portrait of the founder by a former student.. The Met catalogue records Courbet's attendance in the early 1840s and notes that Manet, Monet, and Pissarro had also studied there by 1861.
- A French account of 1831 on the terms: "Contrairement aux autres Académies, on n'y reçoit aucun enseignement" ("Unlike the other academies, no teaching is given there"), Suisse offering hard-up artists a place to work and the use of a model for a derisory ten francs.
- John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: the standard narrative of the Suisse as the meeting ground of the group, including Pissarro first noticing Cézanne there in 1861.
Open questions
- The record of the man himself is thin, and that is the honest state of it. Artists' models almost never left names behind; Suisse is a rare exception, and what survives of him is a fee, a room, a note that he posed for David, and Courbet's portrait. There is no memoir, no correspondence, and no likeness from life.
- Which Suisse the school is named for is genuinely muddled. Martin François Suisse founded it, but it is widely called the Académie de Charles Suisse after the nephew who ran it from 1858, and some reference works confuse that nephew with the architect Charles Suisse (1846-1906), who is a different person entirely.
- The hours do not agree across sources. The Cézanne literature gives eight to one and seven to ten. A six in the morning start is also widely repeated, and Zola's letter to Cézanne proposes a day painting from the model from six until eleven, which may be the origin of it. The often-quoted claim that Cézanne worked there from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. could not be traced to a locatable source and is not stated in this record.
- The model rotation reported in secondary accounts, a male model for three weeks of each month and a female model for the fourth, is not confirmed by any primary source. Nor is the claim that the painters chose the poses by collective agreement.
- The handover to Colarossi is dated two different ways. The Suisse literature puts Crébassol's sale in 1879 with the Académie Colarossi opening in 1880, while Odile Ayral-Clause's biography of Camille Claudel dates Colarossi's acquisition of the studio to around 1871. This record uses 1879.
- Delacroix, Corot, Ingres, Géricault and other early names appear on the studio's attendee roster without dates or independent documentation, so none of them are treated here as established students.
- No student register, account book, or administrative archive of the Académie Suisse is known to survive. The successor school's records were destroyed in the 1930s, which removed the last plausible hiding place for any Suisse-era papers.
Common questions
What was the Académie Suisse?
A single rented room at 4 Quai des Orfèvres in Paris, opened in 1815 by a former artist's model named Martin François Suisse, that sold one thing: access to a live model for a small monthly fee. There were no teachers, no entrance examination, no curriculum, and no corrections. It ran for sixty-four years and was sold in 1879 to Filippo Colarossi.
Who taught at the Académie Suisse?
Nobody. Zola, writing to Cézanne, said students there worked without their studies being corrected, and a French account of 1831 states outright that no teaching was given. Suisse had trained as a drawing-master and would advise on posing the model, but he ran no classes and marked no work. The teaching that happened came from the painter at the next stool.
How much did the Académie Suisse cost?
About ten francs a month, which Zola names as one of the cheapest rates in Paris; by 1850 the figure given is twenty-five francs. Cézanne had 150 francs a month from his father, so a month of unlimited model time cost him roughly what a few dinners did. Painters who could not pay left drawings against the debt, and the drawings stayed on the walls.
Did Monet and Pissarro meet at the Académie Suisse?
Yes. Monet worked there around 1859 and 1860, before Gleyre's studio, and that is where he and Camille Pissarro became acquainted. Pissarro then found Cézanne at the same easels in 1861, going to see him with Francisco Oller. The core of the group that exhibited together in 1874 was assembled in this room.
What did the room actually look like?
Worn stairs and dark corridors up to a second-floor apartment, then one large studio with an amphitheatre of about eighty stools and benches facing the model's platform. The walls were stained with tobacco smoke and hung with work left behind by students in arrears. The evening session was lit by a single oil quinquet carrying twenty lamps.
Why does a studio with no teaching matter?
Because it isolates the minimum. Strip out the exams, the ranking, the corrections, and the curriculum, and what remains is a model, the hours, and serious people working next to you. That residue produced Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Guillaumin. Every open studio and untutored life-drawing night since is running the same experiment.
Part of the Academies atlas, how painting was actually taught, system by system. The living version of this question: atelier vs online course, and the painters themselves in the Painter Atlas.