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 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in Philadelphia in 1805 by Charles Willson Peale, the sculptor William Rush, and a hundred and twelve subscribers, was the first institution in the United States to run as both an art museum and an art school. It spent its first seventy years as a training ground more than a school. Students copied gallery pictures and drew the casts the Academy sent $1,000 to Paris to buy, and there was no tuition at all. A formal curriculum appeared only in 1856. Then Thomas Eakins came back, teaching from 1876, professor in 1878, director in 1882, and rebuilt American art education on the scientific study of the figure. He dismissed the casts, sent students to the live model early, opened a dissection room with human and animal cadavers, and ran the life class on a printed monthly rhythm ending in timed sketches. His insistence on the fully nude model for both sexes ended it: in 1886 he removed a male model's loincloth in the women's life class and was forced to resign.
How the system worked
Open enrolment into the antique galleries for most of the century, with the life class gated. Before the Eakins reforms a student had to be over twenty-one and submit a cast drawing for approval by a committee of artists. Eakins's printed curriculum, worked out from 1876 with Fairman Rogers, chairman of the Committee on Instruction, replaced patience with sequence: elementary and advanced courses set out in a catalogue.
Three eras in one institution. To 1876: self-directed copying and cast drawing, artist-professors routinely accessible, the first paid Professor of Drawing and Painting (Christian Schussele) only from 1868 and running the school until 1879. 1876 to 1886: the Eakins school, sequential, scientific, figure-centred, in the Furness and Hewitt building that opened in 1876 with large windows for the light. After 1886: the Anshutz synthesis, then Chase from 1896 and Cecilia Beaux from 1895 adding the European painterly layer. Enrolment ran 200 to 250 by 1914 and passed 300 in 1925.
The academic ladder, then its inversion. Casts of heads, casts of figures, then life, each promotion decided by the professor's satisfaction with a drawing. Thomas Anshutz described the pre-Eakins version from the inside: weeks of cast drawing, and after much hard labour and many defeats, a student might be promoted to the life school. Eakins compressed the front of that ladder, pushing students to the live model as soon as practical, on the argument that nature, not the antique, was the Greeks' own teacher.
Promotion by satisfying the Professor of Drawing and Painting at each stage. The 1885-86 Circular splits the antique into a heads class and a full-figure class. There was no degree, which is the American academy pattern: standing came from the annual exhibitions and the prize funds rather than from a diploma.
The 1885-86 Circular's week. Men's life class Monday, Wednesday, Friday evenings 7.30 to 9.30 and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings 9 to 12. Women's life class Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings 9 to 12 and Tuesday, Thursday afternoons 1 to 4. The antique open daily, modelling for both sexes, and anatomy and perspective lectures running throughout. An earlier circular for the 1877-78 term had opened the building to women from 7.30 in the morning to 9.30 at night.
Professorial, and in the Eakins decade, surgical. Eakins served as prosector for Dr. W. W. Keen from January 1877, preparing the cadavers for the anatomy lectures himself, and brought visiting surgeons to the lectern. The dissection room was the correction of the eye itself.
Free, for seventy years. There was no student tuition in 1876. The board noted the rapidly decreasing available funds of the institution in 1879, and a modest tuition was introduced in 1882, under Eakins's directorship, which brought in $1,140 in its first year. Even by 1895 the average tuition was still less than ten dollars. Membership in the Academy itself was a different matter and started at $50 in 1805, which tells you the institution began as much as a subscribers' club as a school.
The curriculum, in training order
Cast drawing, split by the 1885-86 Circular into a heads class and a full-figure class, promotion by a drawing done to the professor's satisfaction. This was the pre-Eakins gate to everything, and the Academy had gone to the trouble of authorizing $1,000 to buy the casts in Paris in its founding year.
Before 1876: age twenty-one plus a committee-approved cast drawing earned the life room.
The life class on a printed monthly rhythm. Weeks one and two, a single long pose. Week three, a new pose every day or night. Week four, timed sketches.
Speed and sustained study trained inside the same month. The schedule is the pedagogy.
The Eakins signature. A working dissection room whose anatomy department grew to hold horses, dogs, cats, and a lion as well as humans, with lectures under Dr. W. W. Keen and plaster casts made from the dissections and hung in the life studios as permanent reference, because cadavers do not keep.
The sculpture class Eakins introduced, modelling the body from the living figure, a first for American art schools, and run for both men and women.
Against the draw-for-years tradition, students were put to paint as soon as practical so they would grasp form in true colour, with photography admitted as a study tool for anatomy and motion.
Materials, models, and the room
- The cast collection, then its demotion. The Academy authorized $1,000 to buy antique casts in Paris in its founding year, and those casts were the school's first spine. Eakins's verdict inverted their standing without removing them: at best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of nature itself.
- The dissection casts. Because cadavers perish, the Eakins classes cast their dissections in plaster. Anatomy made permanent, and hung where the models posed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art still holds them.
- Charcoal, graphite, and the student's own kit. Students supplied their own materials. Charcoal was the primary medium for the antique and the life studies, with graphite and conté alongside it. Maxfield Parrish's surviving life drawing from the men's day class is charcoal and graphite on cream wove paper, which is about as close as we get to seeing the actual working equipment of a PAFA student.
- The camera. Photography as sanctioned equipment for anatomy and motion study, in the Muybridge collaboration era, decades before most academies would let it in the room.
- The nude model, both classes. Eakins's non-negotiable: completely nude models for the men's and women's life classes alike. When male models were first brought into the women's class they had been required to wear a loincloth, and it was Eakins removing one that ended his directorship in 1886.
The people
Who taught
William Rush · Professor of Sculpture from 1811
Co-founder and sculptor, who supervised the school's first life drawing class in 1813.
Christian Schussele · first paid professor, 1868-1879
The school's first salaried Professor of Drawing and Painting, Paris-trained, and the point at which structure began. He taught both Eakins and Mary Cassatt.
Thomas Eakins · taught 1876, professor 1878, director 1882-1886
The revolution: the figure studied as science, the life class at the centre, and the resignation that proved what the position cost. He was prosector for Dr. Keen from January 1877, cutting the cadavers himself.
Catherine Drinker · from 1878
The first woman to teach at the Academy, seventeen years before Beaux joined the faculty full-time.
Thomas Anshutz · assistant from 1878, head instructor from 1886
Eakins's student and successor. The anatomy spine kept, the confrontation retired. He taught Henri, Sloan, Parrish, and the Ashcan generation.
William Merritt Chase · 1896-1909
The European painterly layer laid over the Eakins foundation.
Cecilia Beaux · from 1895
The Academy's first full-time woman instructor, teaching portraiture for two decades: proof the American academy could promote what the European ones still barred.
Who trained here
Thomas Eakins · student 1862-1866, before Paris
PAFA to Gérôme and back. The school's greatest student became its re-founder, and then its casualty.
Mary Cassatt · 1860-1862
Left frustrated by the pace and by the way women students were handled. She and Eliza Haldeman organized their own life classes and posed for each other, which is what the official curriculum was not going to give them.
Cecilia Beaux · from 1876
Took the antique class, the portrait class, the costume class, and an untutored sketch class in 1878, and deliberately stayed out of the life class and the dissection room. She wrote later that a curious instinct of self-preservation kept her outside the magic circle. She came back in 1895 as faculty.
Henry Ossawa Tanner · 1879-1885
One of the first African American students to enrol full-time, and a favoured student of Eakins, who faced vicious racism from his fellow students while he was there.
Robert Henri · 1886-1888
Enrolled the year Eakins was forced out and studied under Anshutz, Thomas Hovenden, and James B. Kelly, then left for the Académie Julian in 1888. The Eakins insistence on the nude and on unflinching realism reached The Art Spirit and the Ashcan school through him.
John Sloan · under Anshutz, 1890s
Ashcan realism's draftsman, Anshutz-trained.
Maxfield Parrish · 1892-1894
Studied under Robert Vonnoh and Thomas Anshutz. Twenty-five of his drawings from the Men's Day Life class survive and were published as a set, which makes his student work the best-documented evidence of what a PAFA life class actually produced.
The primary record
- The Circular of the Committee on Instruction for 1885-1886: the Eakins curriculum in the school's own print, with the monthly life structure, the weekly schedule, and the two antique classes.
- William C. Brownell, "The Art Schools of Philadelphia," Scribner's Monthly (1879), from his interview with Eakins: "I don't like a long study of casts even of sculptors of the best Greek period. At best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of nature itself. The Greeks did not study the antique... The draped figures in the Parthenon pediment were modeled from life, undoubtedly.". The named source for the quotation the record previously carried unattributed. Brownell interviewed Eakins about the Academy's anatomy and dissection work.
- Frank H. Goodyear Jr., A History of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1805-1976: the $1,000 authorized for casts in Paris, the absence of student tuition in 1876, the 1882 tuition that brought in $1,140, and the under-ten-dollar average still holding in 1895.
- Cecilia Beaux, Background with Figures (1930): her account of staying out of the Eakins classes, and of a curious instinct of self-preservation keeping her outside the magic circle.
- The Philadelphia Museum of Art's Eakins anatomical casts (Front of Male Torso, 1880): the dissection pedagogy's surviving objects.
- PAFA, Maxfield Parrish, "Men's Day Life" (ca. 1892-1894), charcoal and graphite on cream wove paper: a student life drawing kept by the school that trained him.
- The 1886 record: Eakins removed the loincloth from a male model in the women's life class, the directors treated it as a breach of respectability, and he was forced to resign.
Open questions
- The women's ladder is documented but its dates are not all firm. Women trained at the Academy from early on, but drew from the casts only with the genitalia covered by a fig leaf and were barred from the life class outright. In 1844 the board gave women exclusive use of the statue gallery on set mornings, with the nude casts removed from view on those days. Anatomy and antique classes opened to them in 1860, and a women's life class with a female model followed in 1868 after a student petition.
- When the male model reached the women's life class is given two ways. One account dates it to 1874 and another to 1877, and both agree the man stayed draped about the loins until Eakins refused to allow it.
- The exact per-student tuition set in 1882 is unknown. Only the total it raised, $1,140, and the under-ten-dollar average of 1895 are recorded.
- Anshutz's post-1886 renewed appreciation for cast drawing is asserted in the research but flagged unverified there; it is not stated as fact in this record.
- "Drawing from the flat," copying two-dimensional prints, was the era's standard opening exercise but is not documented as a required first step at PAFA.
- Pay rates for the life models are not documented, though an 1869 record of a model payment for the life course survives. Whether the Academy sold materials to students is also unknown.
- Written rules of conduct for the Eakins era have not surfaced beyond a circular of about 1860 prohibiting singing, whistling, smoking, spitting, and indecorous conduct in the antique room.
Common questions
What is the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts?
America's oldest art school and museum, founded in Philadelphia in 1805 by Charles Willson Peale, the sculptor William Rush, and a hundred and twelve subscribers, and the first institution in the country to run as both at once. For its first seventy years it trained loosely and charged nothing. From 1876 to 1886 Thomas Eakins rebuilt it into the most scientifically rigorous figure school in America, and its later faculty carried that spine into the twentieth century.
Did PAFA charge tuition?
Not for most of the nineteenth century. There was no student tuition in 1876. The board recorded the rapidly decreasing available funds of the institution in 1879, and a modest fee was finally introduced in 1882, under Eakins's directorship, raising $1,140 in its first year. As late as 1895 the average tuition was still under ten dollars. The Eakins school, the most demanding figure training in the country, was effectively free.
What did Thomas Eakins change at PAFA?
Nearly everything. He demoted the casts, telling an interviewer in 1879 that an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of nature itself. He sent students to the live model and to paint early, opened a dissection room whose anatomy department came to hold horses, dogs, cats, and a lion as well as humans, had the dissections cast in plaster and hung in the studios, introduced clay modelling from the living figure, admitted the camera for anatomy and motion, and put the life class on a printed monthly rhythm ending in timed five, ten, and twenty-five minute poses.
Why was Eakins dismissed from PAFA?
His insistence on the completely nude model for all students collided with propriety. In 1886, after he removed a male model's loincloth in the women's life class, the directors treated it as a breach of respectability and forced him to resign the directorship. The curriculum he built largely survived him, carried on by his student and successor Thomas Anshutz.
When could women study from the nude at PAFA?
In stages, and earlier than in Europe. Women trained at the Academy from early on but could draw the casts only with a fig leaf covering the genitalia, and were barred from the life class. In 1844 they were given exclusive use of the statue gallery on set mornings, with the nude casts taken out of view. Anatomy and antique classes opened in 1860, and in 1868 a women's life class with a female model followed a student petition. The male model came later and stayed draped until Eakins refused to allow it. The École des Beaux-Arts, by comparison, barred women entirely until 1897.
How was the PAFA life class scheduled?
By the school's own 1885-86 Circular. Men Monday, Wednesday, Friday evenings 7.30 to 9.30 plus Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings 9 to 12. Women Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings 9 to 12 plus Tuesday, Thursday afternoons 1 to 4. The antique open daily. And each month ran two weeks of a single pose, a week of daily poses, and a week of timed sketches.
Who trained at PAFA?
Eakins himself, before Paris and Gérôme, and Mary Cassatt just before him. Henry Ossawa Tanner studied under Eakins from 1879. Under Anshutz came the Ashcan generation: Robert Henri from 1886, John Sloan in the 1890s, and Maxfield Parrish from 1892. Cecilia Beaux went from student to the Academy's first full-time woman instructor in 1895, having deliberately avoided the Eakins classes as a student.
From the stories
The Women Who Paid Double: The counterpoint: the academy that opened the life class in 1868 and promoted Cecilia Beaux in 1895.
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.