[5] The Académie Julian not only prepared students for the exams at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but offered independent alternative education and training in arts.

"Founded at a time when art was about to undergo a long series of crucial mutations, the Academie Julian played host to painters and sculptors of every kind and persuasion and never tried to make them hew to any one particular line".

[14] In 1989, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Shepherd Gallery, in Manhattan, devoted to the Academie Julian in Paris as it existed between 1868 and 1939, John Russell wrote: By my count, more than 50 nationalities were represented at the school during its glory years.

He vividly described the Académie Julian as: "A huge room, lighted from above, and smelling strongly of turpentine; tobacco-smoke, sweat and garlic, for the models were mostly children of the South.

A room plastered to the full height of a man's reach with palette scrapings whose many colours mingled to make a warm grey background, hung with the prize studies of decades of concourse, furnished with a huge Godin stove, and tall grass-plaited stools, and a heavy mobile podium on which the model was posed each week by a quarreling agora of tousle-headed youths.

By contrast during World War II, after the 1941 exhibition Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française[19] considerations on "degenerate art" by the German military administration forced the school to close.

For his services to the arts, Rodolphe Julian, described by the Anglo-Irish novelist and critic George Moore as a kind of Hercules, dark-haired, strong, with broad shoulders, short legs, a soft voice and all the charm of the Midi was awarded the Legion of Honour.