An academy under fire

Since the nineteenth century, the Prix de Rome had been the keystone of official French art. The Académie des beaux-arts selected its best pupils by strict rules: set subjects, tests “en loge”, the primacy of history painting and of drawing from the antique.

But living art had built itself elsewhere. The great modern movements — from Impressionism to the twentieth-century avant-gardes — had developed outside the Academy, often against it. Many major painters had never competed, or had failed the competition.

In the eyes of its critics, the Prix de Rome had come to reward a scholarly virtuosity, cut off from the art of its own day. The long Roman apprenticeship, founded on copying the masters and studying the antique, seemed to belong to another age.

An alley lined with clipped hedges, closed at its end by a statue