Academism in painting has been defined as a sort of formalism imposed on art by philosophers and men of letters through too exclusive an admiration for the works of Classical Antiquity. It might also be described as the expression of that which is officially sanctioned by a governing body of painter-professors, endeavouring to control and instruct public opinion and to regulate painting by a sort of schoolmastering system. The Renaissance gave birth to it, and the pedagogues and flatterers who have beset the person and fame of Raffaello Sanzio, living and dead, have fostered it. It grew up side by side with that dignification and ennoblement of painting that is so striking a feature of the sixteenth century, and to it is due the self-consciousness that has haunted the painter ever since. “To this enthronement of Raphael we owe many mediocre and even hateful works. To it we owe the taste for the simpering in religious art; the taste also for modelling that is at once photographic and blurred,

. . . the taste for lowered eyelids or for eyes raised piously to Heaven (expressions that the Saints in ecstasy never had), the taste for noble old men, theatrical philosophers, apostles in paper togas; and all this at the expense of truth which has since been found ignoble, of fine colour which has since been thought too material, and of genius which we have treated as madness.”

Although the spirit of Academism has persisted for four centuries, during which time it has served as a form of arbitrary criterion whereby the art of an individual or of an epoch may be judged by the layman, there have, nevertheless, always been artists of temperament and of fine sensibility who have ignored the precepts of the Academism of their epoch, and who have sought expression by methods that are less dictatorial and pedantic, and, in fact, more proper to art itself.