Academy academie julian

Founded in 1868 by M. Rodolph Julian and located on the Rue de Dragon in the Latin Quarter, the facility became one of the best-known private schools in Paris in the second half of the 19th Century. The Academie began with Julian, an art student supporting himself as a wrestler and circus manager, placing a sign outside a rented building. He persuaded artists to serve as visiting professors. The school expanded to five locations throughout France, and eventually became more prestigeous than Ecole des Beaux Arts, the official state school. Many Americans with art talent took their training at the Academy Julian because of the lack of art schools in America. Well-known American artists who attended the Academie Julian include Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Rauschenberg, Cecilia Beaux, Grant Wood, Edmund Tarbell, Mary Cassatt, and Joseph Henry Sharp. The early curriculum was "strictly academic and subscribed to a literary and sentimental form of naturalism". (Phaidon) However, unlike the Ecole, Julian's curriculum was influenced by modernism. An important emphasis was student critique of each other's work rather than the professor being the all-dominant authority in the classroom. Some of the more famous teachers were William Bouguereau, Gustave Boulanger, Jules Lefebvre, Tony Robert Fleury, and Jean Leon Gerome. Sources: H. Barbara Weinberg, "The Lure of Paris"; "Phaidon Dictionary of American Art"; Ingrid Swanson, 'Anna Huntington Stanley', "American Art Review", pp. 120-121