Die Geschichte
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in Philadelphia in 1805, is the oldest art museum and art school in the United States. It was started by the painter Charles Willson Peale, the sculptor William Rush and a group of artists and merchants who wanted the young country to train its own painters.
Its home is a landmark in itself, a Victorian Gothic building of banded stone and carved brick finished in 1876 to a design by Frank Furness, Philadelphia's boldest 19th-century architect. Inside, the collection follows American art from the colonial era onward, with Peale family portraits and the unflinching realism of Thomas Eakins, who taught and ran the school here until a scandal over a nude model forced him out in 1886.
Students still work in the building, so the museum and the school go on sharing the same walls.
