Academic art, academicism, or academism, is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. This method extended its influence throughout the Western world over several centuries, from its origins in Italy in the mid-16th century, until its dissipation in the early 20th century. Its reached its apogee in the 19th century, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In this period, the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts were very influential, combining elements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres a key figure in the formation of the style in painting. The success of the French model led to the founding of countless other art academies in several countries. Later painters who tried to continue the synthesis included William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart among many others. In sculpture, academic art is characterized by a tendency towards monumentality, as in the works of Auguste Bartholdi and Daniel Chester French.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body. During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work. He finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown.
Nymphs and Satyr is an oil on canvas painting created by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1873. The painting depicts a satyr and a group of nymphs from Greek mythology.
James Gurney is an American artist and author known for his illustrated book series Dinotopia, which is presented in the form of a 19th-century explorer's journal from an island utopia cohabited by humans and dinosaurs.
Julie Bell is an American fine artist, illustrator, photographer, bodybuilder and wildlife painter. Bell is also a fantasy artist and a representative of the heroic fantasy and fantastic realism genres. Bell has won Chesley Awards and was the designer of the Dragons of Destiny series. She also won first place awards in the Art Renewal Center International Salon, which bestowed on her the title "ARC Living Master".
Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian impressionist painter.
Mark Vallen is an American activist with Chicano and other issues, curator, figurative realist painter, and blogger, who runs the Art for a Change web site; he founded The Black Moon web site for Japanese culture.
An atelier is the private workshop or studio of a professional artist in the fine or decorative arts or an architect, where a principal master and a number of assistants, students, and apprentices can work together producing fine art or visual art released under the master's name or supervision.
Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau was an American academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life. She studied in Paris under the figurative painter Hugues Merle (1823–1881), the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911), and finally under William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). After Bouguereau's wife died, Gardner became his paramour and after the death of his mother, who bitterly opposed the union, she married him in 1896. She adopted his subjects, compositions, and even his smooth facture, channeling his style so successfully that some of her work might be mistaken for his. In fact, she was quoted as saying, "I know I am censured for not more boldly asserting my individuality, but I would rather be known as the best imitator of Bouguereau than be nobody!"
Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative and supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics. The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
Graydon Parrish is a realist painter living in Austin, Texas. He is both trained in and an exponent of the atelier method which emphasizes classical painting techniques.
Imān Maleki is an Iranian Realist painter.
Bryan Lamont Larsen Jr. is an American realist painter, born in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 12, 1975.
Première rêverie, also known in English as Whisperings of Love, is a painting by nineteenth-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The work was completed in 1889 and is held at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Robert Isaacson was a collector, scholar, and art dealer eulogized upon his death as "the Berenson of nineteenth century academic studies."
Le Travail interrompu is a painting by nineteenth-century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1891. The painting is currently held in the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Émile Munier was a French academic artist and student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
The Virgin with Angels, also known as The Song of the Angels is an oil painting executed in 1881 by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Its dimensions are 213.4 × 152.4 cm. It is now in the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, California.
The Oreads is an oil painting by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, painted in 1902. Its dimensions are 236 × 182 cm.
Ana Schmidt is a German architect and a painter, winner of the Threadneedle Prize in 2018. She focuses her work on urban landscapes.
