Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century

Academies functioned as the main venues for the promotion, display and teaching of art throughout the 19th century. 20th-century opinion has tended to maintain a consipicuous silence on their account, except for the strategic employment of academicism as a term of abuse. The authors uncover the institutional structures and artistic practices of academies from London and Paris to Dusseldorf and Rio de Janeiro. By situating the efforts of individual artists and academies within the context of a network of global proportions, new insights are gained into the ways in which institutions of art helped shape the 19th century's view of itself as an age of equipoise and civilization amidst the turmoil of rapid social and cultural change.