The Art Students League of New York history

In 1878, League members voted to incorporate and to obtain a charter from the State of New York.

An 1883 amendment further stipulated that applicants attain “the standard in drawing required of students in the life class.” A “Candidate for Membership” card is still pinned to one of the drawings in the League’s collection.

By 1885 it could boast a faculty of drawing instructors that included William Merritt Chase, Walter Shirlaw, William Sartain, Thomas Dewing, Kenyon Cox, and J. Carroll Beckwith.

In his 1886 report on the League’s first decade, President Frank Waller described the school’s life classes as unprecedented and “historic” in American art education, and he proudly listed the number of poses and hours struck for each class the preceding year.

The boom in public building and decoration after 1890 created many opportunities for talented figurative artists.

Cox had established a national reputation as a muralist, beginning with his work for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which led to commissions for numerous state capitol buildings and the Library of Congress.

An 1897 exhibition at Knoedler Galleries in New York presented forty Mowbray works, including literary illustrations and sketches for wall panels in the C.P. Huntington residence representing Music, Literature, Tragedy, Comedy, Electricity, Astronomy, and Painting.

By 1899, most Parisian schools had done away with cast drawing.

Closer to home, League students enjoyed a massive exhibition celebrating the school’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1900, including designs and cartoons for mural decorations by Cox, John La Farge, and others that filled the entire Vanderbilt Gallery (now League studios 15 and 16).

Bellows attended Ohio State University before moving in 1904 to New York City, where he studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, leader of the group of American realist painters called The Eight.

Bellows’s early works show the influence of Henri in their dark, tonal palette, vigorous brushwork, and urban subject matter; typical of this period is Forty-Two Kids (1907), a painting of slum children swimming and diving in the East River.

Cox taught life drawing at the League until 1909, introducing the exacting standards and respect for laborious training absorbed during his three years of study with Gérôme.

Bellows was one of the organizers of the Armory Show of 1913, which introduced European modernist art to American artists and critics.

In 1916 John French Sloan—painter of American realism and member of the The Eight group of New York artists—began teaching at the League.

Among the best known is Dempsey and Firpo (1924; he also produced a painting with this title), a boxing scene that displays the solid modeling of form and geometric approach to design characteristic of Bellows’s later paintings.

After Cox’s retirement, proficiency in the antique was not required for entry into any of the League’s life classes, although the antique class was offered up until 1950.

Also, in 1999 the Kenmore received a Best Practice Award from HUD and was named a Finalist for a Fannie Mae Foundation Maxwell Award for Excellence.