Five centuries of painters teaching painters

Painting instruction is a physical inheritance: it passes from a hand to a hand in a room, or through a book that outlives its author. This map draws that inheritance, from Verrocchio's Florentine workshop to the Art Students League, using the atlas and the academies research as its sources. Hover or tap a name to light their teaching line: gold runs upstream to their teachers, terracotta runs downstream to everyone their teaching reached. Tap a lit name again to open their page.

Every line is documented: the solid ones in the painters' own lineage records, the dashed ones by the books themselves, Bargue's plates copied by Van Gogh, Speed and Loomis and Bammes reaching painters who never met them. The systems behind these rooms, the admission rules, the week-long poses, the fees, are documented school by school in the Academies atlas. This drawing holds a fraction of the full graph; it grows as the atlas does.