Apprenticeship abroad:
Art and architecture in Paris

From the beginning the American Colony had settled in the fashionable neighborhoods of the Right Bank of the Seine. There were also Americans on the Left Bank: students and art students, most particularly. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris had become the Mecca for young Americans wishing to perfect their knowledge of the fine arts, be it painting, sculpture or architecture. Of course some Americans turned towards Italy, Germany or England, but by the end of the century, the preferred destination by far was Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its attendant ateliers.

Starting with the Second Empire and trickling down after the Second World War, there was a real flow of eager young men and women coming to France, and more especially to Paris, in order to study art. Strangely enough, such a rush is unknown in any other field than art. Various reasons should be invoked to explain such an attraction to France: the increasing prosperity of the United States, along with its desire to gain access to the international cultural arena; the promotion of arts in France under Napoleon III and the Third Republic; the urge to go transmitted by those back home who had had the experience.

The Salons existed well before Napoleon III. However, under his reign, the image of France changed dramatically to one of a modern country enjoying renewed luxury, a new home for the arts, and a land of plenty as far as art commissions were concerned. The prestige of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, especially after the reform of 1863, started to outshine that of the Academies in London, Munich or Düsseldorf. Moreover, the bustling building atmosphere in the air pervading Paris from Haussmann on, all the new monumental sculpture then rising from the earth, the respect the art professions enjoyed in France, the attention given to art exhibitions by the media and the public, the stimulation and fraternity existing between art students in schools, all these feelings and events unknown in America were instrumental in making studies in Paris a unique experience, bringing to maturation many young artists from the United States.

 

The favorable exchange rate and the absence of school fees (except for a modest allocation for "external" studies located outside the Ecole) encouraged Americans to come to France. Nonetheless, a long stay abroad represented a sizable investment in time and money. Most of these young people thus came from wealthy families; some even belonging to the "upper crust", such as Lloyd and Whitney (1864-1943) Warren, cousins of the Vanderbilts.

 

The enthusiasm for things French which then spread among Americans came not only from this desire to absorb European Culture, but also from the discovery of French culture as lived from day to day.

When I first entered the school I was the only American in the class, and it was owing to this that I gradually assumed French manners and ways. My friends were all French students and my habits of thought, artistic and otherwise, influenced by them. To get out of one's national skin is a great broadening of one's point of view, and on this I particularly congratulated myself as one of the advantages of living in France.

This tendency began to be institutionalized during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

A few scholarships were eventually created in the United States at the turn of the century (Alexander Phimister Proctor won the first Rinehart Scholarship in 1896, and Willard Dryden Paddock, the first grant from the Pratt Institute in 1895).