Chapter 3 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 1863

After completing his schooling in Montgomery County, Poole set out for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. He was 22 years old.

Pennsylvania would become the state where he lived formost of his adult life, and the friends he met at the Academy would be friends for his entire life.

According to the PAFA website, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was founded in 1805 by painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale, sculptorWilliam Rush, and other artists and business leaders. Peale and Rush convened a group of community leaders at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to charter a new organization – the Pennsylvania Academy.

Modeled after England’s Royal Academy of Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy was founded “to promote the cultivation of the Fine Arts in the United States of America...”Peale joined sixty-eight businessmen and lawyers to “promotethe cultivation of the FINE ARTS in the United States of America, by introducing correct and elegant copies from works of the first masters in sculpture and painting and by thus facilitating the access to such standards, and also by...assisting the studies and exciting the efforts of the artist gradually to unfold, enlighten, and invigoratethe talents of our countrymen.”

Its first exhibition was staged in an 1806 building, which featured pillars of theIonic orderon the site of the present-dayAmerican Theater on Chestnut and 10th Streets inCenter City Philadelphia. The academy opened as a museum in 1807 and held its first exhibition in 1811, when more than 500 paintings and statues were displayed. The first school classes held in the building werewith the Society of Artists in 1810. By the 1850s, more than 13,000 visitors were paying twenty-fivecents each to view the Academy’s holdings. Special exhibitions featured oversized landscapes, including works by contemporaryHudson River school landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church.

With outstanding painters such as Thomas Sully and Christian Schuesseleon the faculty, the Academy was at the forefront in encouraging contemporary art. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was the first organizedart school in the United States. PAFA offered one classroom for a cast drawing class and a life academy with access to a live model. Cast drawing is the practice of copying a 3-dimensional sculpture orplaster cast from observation.

By 1863, when Poole arrived, PAFA was celebrating more than 50 years as a museum and art school. No tuition was charged until 1882. Poole was a member of the Arts Club. Students registered to take courses and train in fine art. Classes comprised probably 15 to 25 students, segregated by gender and skill. Life classes were typically for advanced students. The length of study was typically 1-2 months at a time (a single course—”Life Class”). Poole attended a PAFA “Life Class” which included drawing from live models.Attending classes at PAFA allowed Poole to make important connections among his fellow students and his teachers. It was herethat he would meet noted American artists Thomas Eakins and MaryCassatt, as well as many other lesser-known artists such as Earl Shinn. Later, Shinn overlapped with Poole and other American artists in Paris, eventually deciding to give up creating art and becomean art critic. Shinn later criticized the Academy in 1884: “No instructionwas provided, but the older students assisted their juniors to the best of their ability. During each winter, weekly lectures on anatomy were delivered by a physician who had no great opinion of the requirements of a congregation of art students.”

Poole was a lifelong Mason, and this network appears as a constant throughout his life. Many of the original founders and directors of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art belonged to the masonic order. In a variety of ways that scholars have yet to explore, freemasonry played a crucial role in the birth and development of American landscape painting. This network would have eventually been instrumental in introducing him to potential clients.

Poole was coming of age in a time when artists like Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt were leading a movement to a new realism based on a nearly scientific attention to detail. According to art historians, landscape painting began to dominate American art in the early part of the 19th century “with idealized images of a vast, unspoiled wilderness that reflected a nation whose identity and belief in its boundless prospects were deeply interwoven withits natural environment.”

Poole had set himself up to succeed as an artist second half ofthe 19th century. He had a good general education and had attended two of the best art schools within his reach. He was the son of a middle-class family with some means to support his education. Now, he needed to prove himself as an artist. Portrait painting was the best way to earn a living.

He came of age as an artist during the ‘Gilded Age,’ when commissioning and collecting art was a feature of power and social status. It was the painters of Hudson River School, founded by Thomas Cole in the latter half of the 19th century, who Poole emulated with his autumnal landscapes that he became known for at the end of his life. The Academy was an important step in Poole’s education. If he were to truly succeed in his chosen profession, however, training and experience would be necessary—and that would require something extraordinary.

When asked about the condition of American art education in the 1860s, Thomas Eakins observed, “The facilities for study in this country were meager. There were even no life classes in our art schools and schools of painting. Naturally one had to seek instruction elsewhere, abroad.” In this case, “abroad” meant the City of Lights—Paris, France. It was to this beacon of artistic expression that many aspiring young American artists gravitated.But before the Paris adventure became a reality for Poole, therewere a series of activities that helped develop his skills and that reinforced the young artist’s desire to constantly improve.