[Image: Musee d'Orsay clock face looking to the Louvre, eb /Artwork: designslinger]

Our niece arrived this morning in Paris to start 8 months of study as a Fulbright scholar at the
Sorbonne. She joins a long line of Americans who have chosen to further their academic work in a French institution of higher learning. With her undergraduate degree in French and art history behind her, she has chosen to pursue her interest in museum studies in one of the cultural capitals of the world. This was the same decision a young 19-year-old came to in 1846, when Richard Morris Hunt decided to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the City of Light.

The school, the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, had been in existence for 198 years
by the time Hunt arrived. Created by Cardinal Mazarin, and requisitioned by Louis XIV, the Acadamie became the training ground for all those who would work on the royal palace at Versailles and compete in the annual cut-throat competition, the Premier Grand Prix de Rome. Over the next two centuries the school morphed into the premiere center of learning for those interested in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture and even gem cutting; the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The architectural program Hunt matriculated into was steeped in the classicism of Greek and Roman antiquity, and after he returned to the States in 1855, he was followed by a group of other young men who went on to become prominent practioners of the Beaux Arts style in this country.

[Image: Roof domes, Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier), shutterbuguy via flickr /Artwork: designslinger]

Beaux Arts was known for its Rocco flourishes and its pastiche of classical styles. Order was the
rule of thumb, but the more garlands, balustrades, pilasters, bas-reliefs, sculptures and cartouches you could cram into some kind of coherent fashion - the better. Of course, I exaggerate, but not by much. The firm of McKim, Mead and White became the top dogs of the trend in the U.S., along with Carrere and Hastings, Cass Gilbert and Daniel Burnham. The genre dominated architectural design here for almost two generations.

[Image: Washington Square Arch; McKim, Mead & White, keston! via flickr /Artwork: designslinger]

The number of structures built that owe their design heritage to the Beaux Arts influence is huge.
Paris is ripe with them as are any number of buildings in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. or San Francisco. The Garnier Opera House in Paris is the penultimate pile of Beaux Arts gobble-de-goop, and McKim, Mead and White's Washington Square Arch in New York, proves that any structure can become a model of the garlanded, cartouched, over-wrought expression the style defined. I'll conclude with Frank Lloyd Wright, no stranger to controversy, who called it, "Frenchite pastry."