About this site

CreaFigs covers figure painting in the West from the Salon of 1865 forward: the named canvases, the institutions that taught the practice, the shows that were closed, the painters still working, and the materials the work is actually made of.

Entries are organised into five sections. Works takes single canvases and reads them closely, with the date, support, dimensions and holding collection as the museum records them. Academies covers the teaching institutions — the Académie Royale and its académie drawing, the Prix de Rome, the Slade, the Art Students League, the Pennsylvania Academy. Refusals follows the rejections: the Salon des Refusés of 1863, the police order that closed Modigliani’s only solo show, the conditions attached when the Royal Academy Schools admitted women to the life class.

Painters Now covers living and recently dead painters who kept the figure — Saville, Marshall, Semmel, Pearlstein, Neel — factually, from the public record. Materials is the linen, the pigments and the brushes, with the makers named: Claessens, Winsor & Newton, the lead-white manufacturers still licensed to produce it.

Every entry is reachable from the archive.