In 1768 the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in London, and two of its thirty-four founding members were women: the painters Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. In a group portrait of the founders, they appear only as painted portraits hanging on the wall, because the men are gathered around a nude male model, and women were not allowed in the life drawing room. After Kauffman and Moser, no woman was elected a full member of the Royal Academy until 1936. That gap of more than 160 years says a great deal about how academies shaped who could become an artist.

Why academies?

In medieval Europe painters belonged to craft guilds, alongside saddlers and goldsmiths. Ambitious artists wanted to be seen as learned professionals, like poets and scholars. In 1648 the French crown approved the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. The French Academy trained artists and raised painting to a learned profession, under royal sponsorship and control. Students drew first from engravings, then plaster casts of ancient statues, and only later from living models. Training stressed drawing, anatomy, perspective and the study of classical and Renaissance masters.

The Academy also ranked subjects. In 1667 its secretary André Félibien set out what is called the hierarchy of genres. At the top of the hierarchy of genres stood history painting: large scenes from the Bible, myth, ancient history or great events. Below it came portraits, then scenes of everyday life, then landscape, and at the bottom still life. The ranking assumed that showing human actions and moral choices required the most learning and imagination. It also governed prices, prizes and canvas size.

The Salon

From the late seventeenth century the Academy held exhibitions in the Louvre, known as the Salon after the room where they were first hung. The Salon was the official exhibition where a jury chose works, and success there could make an artist's career. Paintings covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Tens of thousands of visitors came, newspapers published reviews, and criticism became a public activity. For two centuries a French artist who never showed at the Salon struggled to find buyers.

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

Late in the eighteenth century many artists turned back to ancient Greece and Rome for both style and morals. Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, shown at the Salon of 1785, depicts three Roman brothers swearing to fight for their city while the women of the family collapse in grief. Neoclassical painting used clear outlines and stern ancient subjects to celebrate civic virtue and self-sacrifice, values that soon took on revolutionary meaning.

The Romantics answered with emotion, motion and the drama of the present. Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, finished in 1819, shows survivors of a French navy shipwreck of 1816, in which about 150 people were set adrift on a raft and only around fifteen lived. The disaster had become a political scandal because the captain was an inexperienced nobleman appointed through favor. Géricault gave a recent scandal the huge size usually reserved for history painting, and he placed a Black man, waving a cloth toward a distant ship, at the peak of the composition.

Realism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, some painters rejected both the noble past and romantic drama. In 1839 Louis Daguerre had announced a practical form of photography, and new questions arose about what painting was for. Gustave Courbet led a movement called Realism. Realism aimed to show contemporary life and ordinary people as they actually appeared, without idealizing them. Jean-François Millet painted peasants at work, and Honoré Daumier drew biting caricatures of politicians and scenes in third class railway carriages. When the 1855 Universal Exposition in Paris rejected some of his major works, Courbet built his own Pavilion of Realism next door, one of the first solo shows staged by an artist against official taste. Courbet shocked critics by painting ordinary villagers at the enormous size reserved for history painting.

Worked example: a funeral in Ornans

Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, painted in 1849 and 1850 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, is enormous: over three meters high and more than six meters wide. Form: about fifty life-size figures stand in a long, crowded frieze across the canvas under a grey sky. There is no central hero and no clear focal point; the open grave sits at the bottom edge, almost in our space. The colors are mostly black mourning clothes, white collars and the dull tones of the land.

Content: this is the funeral of an ordinary man in Courbet's home village. The mourners are real local people, including the mayor, the priest and Courbet's relatives, and they look distracted, bored or grieving, as people at funerals do. No angels appear, no glimpse of heaven.

Context: critics were shocked by the size of the canvas. By the rules of the hierarchy of genres, such people belonged in small scenes of everyday life. In the years after the revolution of 1848, giving rural working people the scale of kings and heroes looked like a political statement about who mattered. Whether or not Courbet intended that, the painting challenged the Academy's claim to decide what deserved serious attention.