File:Art and criticism - monographs and studies (1892) (14597953260).jpg

Identifier: criticismmo00chil (find matches)
Title: Art and criticism : monographs and studies
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Child, Theodore
Subjects: Art criticism
Publisher: Harper
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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, was the stronghold of blind con-servatism, and that the members of the Academy of Fine Artshad formed themselves into a holy league for the maintenanceof sound doctrines and the monopoly of all public works. Thelaureates of the Ecole de Rome held together, helped eachother on, creating vast social and official ramifications and in-fluences, and for years succeeded in making the Institute aclose corporation, into which none could penetrate unless hehad passed through the regular course of submission, camara-derie, and intrigue. During the first half of this century theInstitute tyrannized over French art, admitting no doctrinesand no manifestations at variance with its own, and carryingits jealous care so far that the guardians of the Louvre Muse-um had orders to prevent students from drawing any but cer-tain statues selected by the infallible Areopagus. It was ab-solutely forbidden, for instance, even in the beginning of theSecond Empire, to copy an Etruscan vase, the members of the
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THE TIGER HUNT.—RIGHT SIDE OF GROUP.—(CIRE PERDUE.)Engraved by F. H. Wellington. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE. 193 Institute being of opinion that such examples would tend tocorrupt the taste of the student. The Romantic movement of1830 was directed against this positive oppression of the Insti-tute, and instances such as the one just cited will help to ex-plain the virulence of the combat. As regards Barye, who wasevidently as dangerous and pernicious an innovator as Dela-croix, the Institute, unable to ignore him on account of thepopularity of his works in the eyes of the public, and of thehigh esteem in which they were held by the independent crit-ics, adopted at first the policy of depreciating him and treatinghim as a mere amimalier, a modeller of animals, of beings be-longing to a lower rank of creation ! Now Barye was longingfor a chance to model figures in monumental style, and whenThiers, who was one of his early admirers, proposed that heshould be commissioned to decorate the Pon

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