A New Internationalism in American Art & Architecture

William Cullen Bryant gave the address at the building's opening on April 29, 1865: "After forty years of wandering, the academy has a fixed habitation...The close of this nomadic stage in their history is marked by rearing this temple to Art." As evidence of his belief in the newly elevated status of artists, he continued, "Let us hope that the opening of this edifice, consecrated to Art, will mark our entrance upon a new stage of progress, even higher and nobler than we have yet attained."

Academy President Daniel Huntington later stated, "One thing let us keep clearly in view; the control and direction of the Academy must be kept absolutely in the hands of the professional members....[which] the illustrious founder Prof. Morse...fought so manfully in the beginning, and which we ought faithfully to guard. Better that this building should be leveled with the dust and we begin again without a dollar than to yield an iota of the right of artists to govern an academy of art."

Works from the Suydam bequest.

Works from the Suydam bequest.

Early 1870s: Faced with mounting deficits from its school, the Academy agreed to a proposal by the trustees of The Cooper Union to merge the two schools. However, due to certain conditions in The Cooper Union's charter, the Academy withdrew its agreement and debated charging fees to its students.

The waning of the Hudson River School was followed by the rise of a variety of European artistic currents, including the Barbizon and Academic school of France, and the Royal Academy and Leibl Circle in Munich. Academicians like George Inness NA and Homer Dodge Martin NA were just two artists who were heavily influenced by the Barbizon tradition with its focus on realistic, unidealized depictions of landscape, a focus on light and tonality, and loose brushwork.

By comparison, the work of Academicians like Frank Duveneck NA and Charles Ulrich NA revealed the impact of the Leibl Circle in Munich, seen in their depictions of realistic genre scenes of everyday life and ordinary people, executed with a direct and painterly technique.

Around this time, we begin to see traces of artists’ friendships and social networks abroad appear in the artworks donated to the Academy's collection. For example, the American expatriate John Singer Sargent NA chose to offer a profile portrait of his friend Claude Monet as his diploma work to stand alongside his own likeness.  This pair signifies their bond and Monet’s decisive influence on the younger Sargent’s development and production.

The friendship of Robert Frederick Blum NA and William Merritt Chase NA is another great example. The two artists travelled throughout Europe together in the first half of the 1880s, frequently depicted one another, and were elected Associate National Academicians in the same year (1888).

European art education had a lasting impact on some American artists who would become famed teachers in their own right. Thomas Eakins NA and Cecilia Beaux NA both taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Beaux becoming the first woman to teach art there.

Coincidentally, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had targeted the entire block for its own expansion, so the Academy sold the building to Met Life for $610,000 (an estimated $33 million today). The Doge's Palace was demolished, its building material reused in the Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Harlem.

Instead of the Carrère and Hastings building, the Academy built a temporary school building on the site at 110th Street. 

With classes being held uptown, the Academy presented its Annual exhibitions at the recently built American Fine Arts Society Building (now Art Students League) at 215 West 57th Street beginning in 1900. The Academy began the 20th Century with its activities split between two locations (one of which was meant to be temporary), a state of affairs that left many Academicians missing their old home on 23rd Street.