National Academy of Design

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The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design—known simply as the "National Academy"—is an honorary association of American artists, with a museum and a school of fine arts.

It was founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others "to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition."

The academy houses a public collection of over five thousand works of nineteenth and twentieth century American art.

It has had several homes over the years. Notable among them was a building built during 1863-1865, of Gothic Revival style, which was modeled on the Doge's Palace in Venice. Since 1942 the academy has occupied a mansion that was the former home of sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and Archer Milton Huntington at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street.

The school offers studio instruction, master classes, intensive critiques, various workshops, and lunchtime lectures. Scholarships are available.

[edit] History

The original founders of the National Academy of Design were students of the American Academy of Fine Arts. However, by 1825 the students of the Academy felt a lack of support for teaching from the Academy, its board composed of merchants, lawyers, and physicians, and from its unsympathetic president, the famous American Revolutionary War artist Colonel John Trumbull. Samuel F. B. Morse and other students set about forming the drawing association to meet several times each week for the study the art of design. Still, the association was viewed as a dependent organization of the Academy, from which they felt neglected. An attempt was made to reconcile the difference and maintain a single academy by appointing six of the artists from the association as directors of the Academy, however, when four of the nominees were not elected, the frustrated artists resolved to form a new academy and the National Academy of Design was born.^[1]

[edit] Members of the National Academy of Design

Members of the National Academy are denoted by "N. A.", and one cannot apply for membership. Some of the better-known members of the Academy have included: