Arts. The Academy was founded in 1805 by Charles Wilson Peale, William Rush, and other artists and business leaders of Philadelphia. It is the oldest art museum and school in the nation (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Academy only admitted male students, but later women pupils, as well.The Academy’s primary instruction when it was first incorporated was the study of casts of classical statues in the Louvre (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). It continued educating its students in a classical manner and drawing from the live nude model was introduced around 1812, followed in succeeding decades by figure modeling and portrait classes. One of the most famous aspects of the Academy’s drawing and sculpture program began in the 1880s, by the hands of a man named Thomas Eakins (McKinney 16). A new kind of study was introduced to help the pupils with their instruction—anatomy. The Academy was very well known for is anatomy program, which had pupils dissecting cadavers and animals in order to gain a truly comprehensive knowledge of life from which to draw and sculpt from (McKinney 16).A most interesting fact surrounding the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts concerns the start of drawing from life, from the nude. During its beginnings, there was significant controversy surrounding the allowance of nudes for life drawing at the Academy, especially for women. Male models were allowed to pose completely nude for men’s drawing classes but had to wear a loincloth when posing for women’s classes. And the women who stood for life drawing classes were always made to wear a mask over their faces, so as to sustain “morality.” Thomas Eakins, who was a student at the Academy and later a teacher and director completely ignored this fact. A Philadelphia newspaper from 1886 once said that, “Mr. Eakins has for a long time entertained...
