Academic Art

The art of the official academies and Salons of the nineteenth century, above all in Paris, but also in London, Munich, St Petersburg and elsewhere. Trained in drawing from casts and life, painters such as Bouguereau, Cabanel, Gérôme and their many pupils produced flawless, highly finished history paintings, mythological nudes and allegories, with invisible brushwork and porcelain skin. The Academy ranked subjects (history at the top, still life at the bottom) and judged by finish and correctness. Hugely popular in its day and dismissed by modernists for a century, it is now admired again for its technique.

How to tell it apart: smooth, glossy surfaces and idealised figures, usually from myth, the Bible or history; Realism shows ordinary people and Impressionism visible, broken strokes.

1,547 works in the quiz. Play a round on Academic Art.

Artists

Francisco Goya · John Singer Sargent · J. M. W. Turner · Raja Ravi Varma · Édouard Manet · Jacques-Louis David · Eugène Delacroix · Taras Shevchenko · William-Adolphe Bouguereau · Gustave Courbet · Jean-Léon Gérôme · Juan Luna · William Hogarth · Thomas Gainsborough · Alexandre Cabanel · Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · John Trumbull · Joshua Reynolds · James Tissot · Lawrence Alma-Tadema · Joseph Ducreux · Gustave Moreau · Nicolas Poussin · Edward Burne-Jones · Karl Bryullov · Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot · François Boucher · Thomas Eakins · Thomas Lawrence · Rosa Bonheur

Best-known works

“Fallen angel” — Alexandre Cabanel, 1847
“Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)” — John Singer Sargent, 1884
“Dante and Virgil in Hell” — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1850
“The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” — Paul Delaroche, 1833
“Pollice Verso” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872
“Nero's Torches” — Henryk Siemiradzki, 1876
“The Birth of Venus” — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879
“The Birth of Venus” — Alexandre Cabanel, 1863
“The Slave Market” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866
“Oedipus and the Sphinx” — Gustave Moreau, 1864
“The Death of Socrates” — Jacques-Louis David, 1787
“Nymphs and Satyr” — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873
“Truth Coming Out of Her Well” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896
“Broken Eggs” — Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1756
“Phryne before the Areopagus” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1861
“Bonaparte Crossing the Alps” — Paul Delaroche, 1848
“Valdemar Atterdag holding Visby to ransom” — Carl Gustaf Hellqvist, 1882
“The Pearl and the Wave” — Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, 1862
“Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis” — Henryk Siemiradzki, 1889
“Slave Market in Rome” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1884
“Siegessäule” — Anton von Werner, 1873
“The women of Amphissa” — Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1887
“Joan of Arc” — Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879
“Independence or Death” — Pedro Américo, 1888
“Cleopatra and Caesar” — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866
“The Doctor” — Luke Fildes, 1891
“Christian Dirce” — Henryk Siemiradzki, 1887
“Portrait of Napoleon III” — Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1853
“The Shepherdess” — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1889
“Bringing Home the Body of King Karl XII of Sweden” — Gustaf Cederström, 1884