As one of the oldest art institutions in the United States, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was founded in 1805 by Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), his son Rembrandt (1778–1860), William Rush (1756–1833), and sixty-eight prominent Philadelphians, during Thomas Jefferson’s second term as president. The elder Peale’s indefatigable commitment to the Academy was inextricably linked to his strong belief that a great nation needed venerable artistic traditions and a distinguished cultural identity.
The Academy opened its doors on Chestnut Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Streets) in a building designed by John Dorsey in 1806. (It did not move into the historic building designed by Frank Furness and George W. Hewitt on Broad and Cherry Streets until 1876) At the time Philadelphia was a rich cultural center and the most sophisticated city in the United States; thus, it was an ideal environment for the establishment of the nation’s first art museum and art school. A little more than a year later in 1807, PAFA mounted its first exhibition, which combined plaster casts and loans from the collection of Robert Fulton, and featured paintings by Benjamin West (1738–1820), the Peales, and contemporary British art. Four years later in 1811 the Academy inaugurated its Annual Exhibition, which would become a major event in the art world for over one hundred years, with artists vying to have their works accepted each year. The prizes and prestige the Annual conferred on the participating artists greatly encouraged the development of American painting and sculpture. In intention and effect, it offered a fledgling American art scene a proper stage to promote itself. Other American art institutions followed the Academy’s leadership example throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries by establishing their own annual exhibitions as a means of building their collections and reputations.
By the mid-nineteenth century PAFA stood at the center of cultural life in Philadelphia, and was a driving force in the American art world. Along with the National Academy of Design in New York and the Boston Atheneum, the Academy was recognized as a leader in its support of American Art. Its exhibitions were on the vanguard of contemporary painting and the school’s curriculum was one of the most innovative in the country. As early as 1812–13, following the lead of prominent European academies, PAFA was one of the first American art institutions to offer life drawing classes to its students. By the late 1870s, life drawing and the study of anatomy were part of the curriculum at most American art schools, but they received the greatest attention at PAFA particularly under the direction of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), who joined the faculty in 1876 and became the school’s director in 1882. Eakins was highly instrumental in changing the Academy’s curriculum. The importance he placed on drawing from the nude, anatomical study and dissection, scientific perspective, and using photographs as tools revolutionized PAFA’s classrooms. He attracted a great number of new students to the Academy, and essentially changed the way art was taught. Yet he simultaneously built on the Academy’s long tradition of realism and figuration. Even after his forced resignation in 1886, the spirit of Eakins’s methodology lived on and profoundly affected many of the students who studied in the Academy’s halls.