Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture
It included most of the important painters and sculptors, maintained almost total control of teaching and exhibitions, and afforded its members preference in royal commissions.
[1] According to the 17th century Mémoires about the founding of the Académie royale, a few "superior men" who were "real artists",[n 1] suffered and felt humiliated under the guild system.
[5] With the support of Le Brun's patron Pierre Séguier, Chancellor of France, Charmois presented the petition to the nine-year-old King Louis XIV, his mother Anne of Austria who acted as regent and the whole Royal Council on 20 January 1648 at the Palais-Royal.
[6] The promoters immediately got to work and in January 1648 formulated statutes with 13 articles (approved in February and published on 9 March 1648), a key element of which was a public art school.
[9] These first anciens were the painters Charles Le Brun, Charles Errard, François Perrier, Juste d' Egmont, Michel I Corneille, Henri Beaubrun, Laurent de La Hyre, Sebastien Bourdon, Eustache Le Sueur and the sculptors Simon Guillain, Jacques Sarazin and Gerard van Opstal.
[17] Le Brun's involvement in the Académie and his position of first painter to the king, allowed him to dictate all painting, sculpture, and tapestry expectations.
Specifically, for projects such as the Grande Galerie du Louvre, Académie artists found themselves carrying out designs originated by Le Brun.
[19] In addition to the Mémoires Montaiglon also published the minutes of the academy in ten volumes from 1875 to 1892: From 2006 to 2015, a critical edition of the Conférences held at the Académie royale was published by Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel as a collaborative Project of the German Center for Art History, the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris[20] and made available online:
