Académie Julian

The Académie Julian was a private art school founded in Paris in 1868 by the painter Rodolphe Julian. It became the principal alternative to the official École des Beaux-Arts, above all because it admitted women, whom the state school excluded from enrolment until 1897. The academy prepared students for the entrance examinations of the state school, offered intensive work from the model under celebrated academic masters such as William Bouguereau and Jean-Paul Laurens, and imposed no restrictions of origin or nationality, thereby attracting artists from all over the world. It was here that the future Nabis—Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Paul Sérusier—trained, along with numerous American, Canadian, and Eastern European painters. Through its openness and its high standard of teaching, the Académie Julian played a key role in shaping the modernist generation at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.