Beaux-Arts de Paris

Listen for a moment. Behind you, traffic hums along the riverbank. In front of you, the street goes quiet. Rue Bonaparte is narrow here, lined with galleries and old bookshops, and the stone underfoot is worn smooth. Somewhere beyond the tall iron gates, a student drags a canvas across a courtyard, and laughter drifts out of an open window. This is the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the national school of fine arts. For about two centuries, young artists have walked through these gates hoping to learn their craft.

Begin with the setting, because it explains a great deal. The school stretches from rue Bonaparte down to the Quai Malaquais, on the left bank of the Seine. Directly across the water stands the Louvre, the former royal palace and today one of the largest museums in the world. That view was never an accident. Students could study the masters in the galleries over there, then cross the bridge and practise over here. The river ran between ambition and tradition, and generations of artists crossed it on foot.

Before it was a school, this ground was a convent. In the early seventeenth century, Queen Margaret of Valois, the first wife of King Henry the Fourth, founded a religious house here for a community of Augustinian friars. People knew it as the convent of the Petits-Augustins. Its gardens ran down toward the river. Little of that quiet monastic life is visible now. But the chapel survived, and the shape of the site still follows the old convent walls in places. You are standing on layered ground.

Here is the first surprise. During the French Revolution, in the 1790s, mobs and officials stripped churches and abbeys across France. Tombs were smashed. Royal statues were thrown down. A determined man named Alexandre Lenoir set out to save what he could. He gathered sculptures, tombs and architectural fragments into this former convent. The result became the Museum of French Monuments, one of the first public museums of its kind. For a generation, Parisians came here to walk among rescued stones from all over the country.

That museum did not last. After the fall of Napoleon, many objects returned to churches or moved elsewhere, and the museum closed in 1816. The empty site then passed to the school of fine arts. Yet some of Lenoir's rescued fragments never left. As you walk through the courtyards, look closely at the walls. Carved arches, old portals and broken columns sit embedded in the newer buildings. They are survivors from older places, kept here as lessons in stone for the students who pass them daily.

The most famous of these pieces is a section of the facade from the Château d'Anet. This was a Renaissance castle built in the sixteenth century for Diane de Poitiers, the powerful companion of King Henry the Second. Its architect was Philibert de l'Orme, one of the great French designers of his age. The fragment stands in the first courtyard, with stacked classical columns and careful carving. It looks almost like a stage set. For students, it was a textbook they could touch.

Now turn toward the main building at the back of the courtyard. This is the Palace of Studies, designed in the nineteenth century by the architect Félix Duban. Its pale facade follows the language of the Italian Renaissance, with tall arched windows and calm, balanced proportions. Duban wanted the building itself to teach. Proportion, rhythm and order were the subjects, and the walls displayed them. Inside, the central courtyard was later covered with a glass roof, so soft light falls onto the casts and sculptures below.

The school's whole method rested on copying. Students drew from plaster casts of ancient statues for months, sometimes years, before they were trusted with a live model. The old chapel of the convent became a hall of reproductions. It holds copies of Renaissance masterpieces, including a large painted copy of Michelangelo's Last Judgment from the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Imagine a nineteenth-century student, charcoal in hand, standing in that echoing space and trying to understand how Michelangelo built a human body.

The great prize of that era was the Prix de Rome. Winners earned a long stay in Rome, at the French Academy there, to study classical art at its source. Competition was fierce, and the rules were strict. Many artists who later changed modern art passed through these studios. Edgar Degas studied here briefly. So did Georges Seurat, who later developed his method of painting with tiny dots of colour. Some students embraced the discipline. Others spent their careers pushing against it.

The architecture teaching here was just as influential. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, architects came from many countries to study in Paris. They took home a grand, symmetrical style of public building. Today people often call it simply Beaux-Arts architecture, after this school. You can see its traces far from Paris, in railway stations, libraries and museums across Europe and the Americas. A style of stone columns and sweeping staircases spread around the world from these few courtyards.

Here is the second surprise. The school is not only about marble and tradition. In May 1968, when students and workers filled the streets of Paris in protest, students here turned their studios into a print workshop. They called it the Popular Workshop. Working day and night, they produced simple, bold posters with short slogans, and these were pasted on walls across the city. Those posters are now collected by museums. A place built to teach the old masters became a factory of protest.

The school is still very much alive. Students work in painting, sculpture, photography, film, design and new media. Exhibitions open in its halls throughout the year, and some spaces welcome the public on certain days. Even from the street, you may catch a glimpse of current work through a doorway. Remember that this is a working school first. People here are learning, failing and trying again. The courtyards are their corridors, not a stage for visitors, so move gently.

Before you leave, stand at the gate for a minute. Look back at the old stones set into the newer walls, and at the pale facade beyond. Then turn toward the river. Walk down to the Quai Malaquais and look across the Seine at the long front of the Louvre. You are tracing the same short route that students once walked between study and practice. Notice the bookstalls along the parapet, the sound of the water... and the light on the stone.