Criticism in the Academies

Sorry, your work is 'weak,' 'insipid,' 'soft,' and 'Inlaid.'

The École des Beaux-Arts was known for its rigorous and traditional approach to art education, emphasizing classical techniques and styles. The school stressed fundamental classical values of "simplicity, grandeur, clean lines, and harmony of color and style.”

But what kinds of faults would a teacher have actually zeroed in on?

Earl Shinn, writing in The Nation magazine in 1869, described the terms of criticism that students heard most commonly from teachers in the École des Beaux-Arts, especially from Jean-Leon Gérôme. These terms, and the concepts they represent, provide an insight into the aesthetics that were valued in an academic figure study. Quoting Shinn:

"Too insipid, too weak and soft.
This is said of the flesh, or, as the French say, the skin."

"Inlaid.
This condemns our anatomy, when it has the look of being patched on the surface rather than woven under from the bone.”

"False sentiment.
This stricture is not necessarily applied to a Della Cruscan* elegance, but has been heard over a drawing of the Laocoön expressing too much passion and motion instead of the wonderfully caught rigidity of the original."

“You have not seized the movement.
This is one of the commonest of our difficulties; the word may apply to the most inert things, as the sweep of a lock of hair ; the lay of a fold of drapery, or of patterns on the fold; the expression of a supine hand, etc."
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*Note: These criticisms have nothing to do with the painting above. "Della Cruscan" refers to members of a late 18th-century school of English writers of pretentious, affected, rhetorically ornate poetry.
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