The Ennoblement of the Artist in the 17th Century: A Look Back at the Creation of the Royal Academy
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 7 min read
In the middle of the seventeenth century, France passed through a period of political turbulence marked by the Fronde; it was also the setting for a socio-professional revolution concerning the status of artists.
In the first half of the 17th century, the figure of the artist as conceived after the creation of the Royal Academy—haloed with prestige and respected—did not exist.
The practice of painting or sculpture was then devalued, as it was conceived as manual labour, which justified the popular adage "as beggarly as a painter."
The study of the archives of the year 1648 allows us to understand the inner workings and the degree of audacity required for the birth of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
The Stigmatisation of Painters and Sculptors
Since Antiquity, human activities have been divided according to their relationship to matter and the intellect. Disciplines pertaining to the liberal arts, including rhetoric, grammar, geometry, or astronomy, were considered noble due to their intellectual character.
Contrary to what was reported in the 17th century, painting and sculpture are not mentioned as ancient free arts.
This division evolved over the centuries and became more precise in the Middle Ages, although regulations were specific to each town.
Overall, painting and sculpture, involving direct contact with raw matter—grinding pigments, carving stone, working wood, or handling solvents—pertained to a physical practice.
Consequently, they were relegated to the rank of mechanical art, the artes mechanicæ; more precisely, they constituted a subclass of armatura as defined by Hugh of Saint Victor in the 13th century.
The classification was taken up and detailed by Charles Loyseau in his Treatise, published at the beginning of the 17th century, as the hierarchy established in the Middle Ages remained valid: within the Third Estate, practitioners of the mechanical arts appeared at the bottom of the social ladder, far behind intellectuals, financiers, and merchants, only one step above labourers and mercenaries. One could hardly go any lower.
The Grip of the Corporation and the First Fractures
This categorisation translated legally into the registration of painters and sculptors within a rigid and restrictive corporatist system.
Since the end of the 14th century, a Parisian structure, the Corporation or Mastery of painters and sculptors commonly named the Community (Communauté), imposed strict rules on apprenticeship, the hereditary transmission of the trade, and the standardisation of production. The main objective of this organisation was to maintain an economic monopoly, control quality standards, and protect the local market against foreign competition.
But a progressive split occurred within this very group.
An elite of craftsmen who fulfilled commissions for a prestigious clientele distinguished themselves from simple house painters or vulgar stonemasons through the use of precious materials or the sacred dimension of their works. Some even joined the court as royal commensals, residing within the palaces and benefiting from exemptions that increasingly removed them from the authority of the corporation.
The researcher Nathalie Heinich emphasises, moreover, that the presence of foreign artists at court openly violated the protectionist principles of the Community, triggering multiple disputes before the Parliament. These legal conflicts eventually irritated the royal power—Louis XIV, in this instance—in the midst of consolidating his absolutism.
To put it simply, it was increasingly odious to him to know his artists were under the thumb of the Corporation or the Parliament, when he intended to have them in his own service. The birth of the ROYAL Academy of arts was also the consequence of a power struggle.
Secession and the Ennoblement of Artists
The emancipation took place in 1848, but it gave rise to decades of hesitations that pitted the academic artists against the tradespeople.
A reminder of the facts:
A faction of elite artists, represented notably by Martin de Charmois, secretly submitted a petition to the sovereign in order to free themselves from the tutelage of the mastery of the painters and sculptors of Paris.
This initiative caused stupefaction among parliamentary bodies, as evidenced by the incredulous reaction of President Mathieu Molé; the idea of an ACADEMY of artists could only be a hallucination. Until then, the title of Royal Academy was a privilege reserved for intellectual and literary institutions. Painters and sculptors stained with marble dust or pigments could not be part of the circle of intellectuals.
Supported by the King and the Queen Regent, eager to put an end to the abuses of the corporation, the petition resulted in the creation of the Royal Academy of Painters and Sculptors.
The statutes of this new institution, validated by the King, marked a break in the institutional history of the arts.
The training of artists focused on scientific and theoretical foundations. Students henceforth studied geometry, anatomy, perspective, and mathematics; Article XIII of the statutes specified that competitions would focus on heroic subjects glorifying the sovereign; hence the future importance of history painting and the hierarchy of genres. The teaching of colour, perceived as too closely linked to the grinding of pigments, was moreover excluded from the internal programme until the reform of the School of Fine Arts in 1863.
The members of the new academy now had the right to freely exercise their art across the entire national territory without having to pay traditional mastership fees or respect the regulations of the guilds.
This transition from the status of craftsman to that of academician represented an essential social ascent, upon which Ludovic Vitet commented in the 19th century. By claiming a symbolic lineage with the Academy of Athens from the era of Alexander the Great, these artists asserted their belonging to the liberal arts. Their motto celebrates this restitution of liberty—a liberty defined above all by the intellectualisation of their practice and the rejection of medieval commercial rules:
“ Libertas Artibus restituta, liberty restored to the Arts ”
The foundations of this hard-won identity would be challenged by the practices of the young moderns in the 19th century, who rehabilitated the materiality of the work through the rejection of the "finish" and the "licked" style, through the primacy of colour over drawing, and through the logic of self-promotion when only the craftsman had the right to keep a shop since 1848.
In mid-nineteenth-century France, the guardians of the French school were challenged by a rival school, that of Courbet, whose realism broke free from classical conventions to embrace, and even glorify, the ugliness of everyday life.
Champfleury defends him; traditional criticism fails to understand; caricature revels in it, and Courbet takes pride in it, even doubling down.
Courbet Gives the Public the Ugly, and on a Grand Scale
Between 1849 and 1855, four canvases wounded the good taste of the public and specialists: The Peasants of Flagey (2.05 x 2.75 m), The Stone Breakers (1.65 x 2.75 m), A Burial at Ornans (3.13 x 6.64 m), and The Bathers (2.27 x 1.93 m).
Had these paintings been smaller, they would have passed for genre painting in the Dutch vein of the Golden Age.
But by asserting himself through the size of history painting—monumental in the case of A Burial—Courbet exhibited human misery without restraint, without compassion, and without "falsism."
The Reversal of Classical Values
Official art continued to prefer the ideal body over anatomical deformities, even as its norms modernized. Let us return to Nicolas Boileau's principle of classical aesthetics:
“Nothing is beautiful but the true. The true alone is lovely.”
In the first half of the 19th century, this "true" referred to a metaphysical truth, to an idealised and unobservable beauty. Under the ironic pen of Théophile Gautier, horrified by Courbet's paintings, the principle then became:
“Nothing is beautiful but the ugly, the ugly alone is lovely.”
He continued by accusing the painter of indulging in a new kind of mannerism that henceforth served not grace, but disgrace.
Champfleury, a partisan of the unfiltered truth represented by Courbet, took offense at this distortion of Boileau's words; why should Courbet be thus condemned, he who followed in the footsteps of a Victor Hugo? The text, initially written in the form of a letter to George Sand, would become what is known as the Realist Manifesto, published in 1855.
The ugliness reproached by Gautier or Charles Perrier was a reproduction of reality devoid of nobility, a representation of the crippled and the destitute with the objective coldness of a photographic plate—monstrous, abject, and without compassion.
Not that they defended the painting of exclusively noble subjects, but they felt that Courbet should at least have the decency to treat them with panache, fire, or dignity, as the Spaniards, the Flemish, or a Delacroix had done before him.
The caricatures sketched by Cham or Daumier testify to this general stupefaction. Courbet's paintings displayed, on a grand scale, stinking monstrosities and deformed gnomes.
To this was added a certain lack of understanding: why also mistreat the working classes and the marginalised when one claims to be politically on the left? Why not provide a sympathetic representation of them?
The Political Function of the Ugly: Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the political friend, appreciated this unfavourable treatment because it was educational. Let us take the case of The Bathers. Their frankly overflowing fat taught the spectator that the indolence of the bourgeois woman was ugly and repulsive. Conversely, Courbet's The Spinner, a peasant girl peacefully asleep after her labor, reflected Proudhon's social and political ideal.
Visual Satire and Provocation: The Art of the Shock
Far from being intimidated by this media onslaught, the painter relished it and pushed provocation to a climax.
He announced the painting of a Franche-Comté funeral meal scene, organised around the remains of a young girl—a project often associated with The Dressing of the Dead Girl, an unfinished canvas.
It was intended to be a dressing of the deceased, with a mirror facing her, which would confirm that no breath emanated from her lungs. Courbet intended to render the greenish hues of a putrefying body; he would paint a stench and exulted in it!
He would be accused of having thus created the "school of the ugly" (Count Horace de Viel-Castel in 1853), an expression that would become a staple of critical vocabulary.
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