(1849-1916) and Theodore Robinson (1852-96); and relative Some American students in Paris joined ateliers organised by homebodies, such as Ernest Lawson (1873-1939). Most of them independent teachers. Cassatt, for example, who acquired art began their studies in American academies that had been formed or fundamentals at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, re-formed according to current European standards after the Civil received private criticism from Gerome around 1866 - a rare War, and then continued their training in Paris. There, a few of them privilege for a woman - but her principal instructor was Charles enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the French government school, Chaplin, who conducted a women's class. Between 1874 until around which offered free instruction to qualified men of any nationality. At 1879, Sargent, whose initial training occurred in Florence in Italy, the Ecole, students of painting could enter one of three ateliers. pass matriculated in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for three semesters. but a rigorous examination to matriculate for drawing instruction, or studied primarily with the portraitist Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand undertake both programs. J Alden Weir (1852-1919), for example, (who called himself Carolus-Duran). a proponent of the Spanish worked first with his father, the drawing professor at the United Baroque style, especially the art of Diego Velazquez. States Military Academy at West Point. He then spent the years 1870-72 at the National Academy of Design, New York, under Lemuel Robinson's instruction in the French manner was extensive and E Wilmarth. who had already worked under Jean-Leon Gerome. the multifaceted. He studied under Wilmarth at the National Academy American students' favourite teacher at the Ecole. Between 1873 and of Design in 1874-75 and helped to organise New York's Art Students 1877, Weir studied under Gerome himself and matriculated in the League, a school that also imparted academic principles. Between Ecole for three semesters. 1876 and 1879, Robinson worked in Paris under Carolus-Duran and in the Beaux-Arts studios of Henri Lehmann and Gerome; matriculated Rather than enrol in the Ecole, many more future American in the Ecole for four semesters; and painted in Grez-sur-Loing (near Impressionists in Paris entered new, for-profit. private academies Barbizon). Veules-les-Roses (near Dieppe). as well as Venice. that flourished as hundreds of aspiring art students arrived from all Established in New York by 1881, Robinson voiced American artists' over the world. Women, excluded from the Ecole until1897, were typical cosmopolitan ambitions in a May 1883 letter to Kenyon Cox, welcomed in these academies, as were men who either could not a fellow student at Gerome's, noting: qualify for admission to the government school or who preferred more flexible, if more costly, instruction. The Academie Julian. I have nearly got rid of the desire to do 'American things'- mostly founded in 1868, was the most successful independent academy because American life is so unpaintable- and a higher kind of art and the future American Impressionists' usual Parisian training seems to me to exclude the questions of nationality. I would like to ground. Frank W Benson (1862-1951), for example, studied from try a little flight into something Biblical or Mythological 5 around 1880 to 1883 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. before working from 1883 to 1885 at Julian's under Given Robinson's immersion in contemporary European art, his Gustave-Rodolphe Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, who internationalist aspirations and ensuing professional activities are were stylistic alter egos of the Ecole's professors. Childe Hassam not surprising. In 1884, Robinson returned to France. where he would (1859-1935) had already studied with several Boston artists, pass most of each year. From 1888 to 1892, he spent summers as a worked as an illustrator, and travelled widely by the time he mainstay of the art colony that surrounded Claude Monet at Giverny, enrolled, from 1886 to 1889, at Julian's under Lefebvre, Boulanger and winters in New York- sharing Monet's precepts with his and Henri-Lucien Doucet. John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) also colleagues such as Weir, Hassam and Twachtman, who had returned studied at Julian's, as did Willard Metcalf (1858-1925), Edmund C from their own studies in Paris. Tarbell (1862-1938) and many others. .