Footnote 1 – Bible Books

The French Academy, founded in 1648, and the Academy in London, founded in 1768, were started to raise the social status of artists, to provide teaching and classes drawing from the nude, and to exhibit members’ work. By the late 19th century the academies exerted a strong conservative control on the style and subject matter paintings accepted for exhibition: They favored highly finished, naturalistic paintings, which, though usually technically skillful, were often sentimental or melodramatic, such as Girodet Trioson’s “The Deluge” (p. 37).