The Sydney Art School (also known as the Julian Ashton Art School), which Ashton established in 1890 as the "Academy Julien", (perhaps a reference to the Académie Julian in Paris) has been and remains to this day one of the most influential in Australia.
Julian Ashton students have included Elioth Gruner, George Lambert, B E Minns, Thea Proctor, Adrian Feint, Sydney Long, Howard Ashton (Julian's son), Dorrit Black, J J Hilder, William Dobell, Edmund Arthur Harvey, Eric Wilson, Jean Bellette, Douglas Dundas, Arthur Freeman, William Dadswell, John Passmore, Joshua Smith, Max Dupain, John Olsen, Michael Johnston, Jim Russell, Sydney Ure Smith, Brett Whiteley, Susan Dorothea White, Nigel Thomson and Salvatore Zofrea.
After Julian Ashton died in 1942, the school was run by Henry Gibbons (1884–1972). Henry Gibbons had started at the school as a student in April 1919 and soon became the teacher of the night drawing classes. In 1924 Gibbons proposed starting a Saturday afternoon class so that he could teach some of the night drawing students to paint. The Saturday class started in February 1924 and the first nine students were Dobell, Dundas, Passmore, Badham, Lawrence, Brackenreg, Byrne, Hubble and Cox. Gibbons taught many winners of the NSW Traveling Arts Scholarship. Henry Gibbons retired in 1960.
Howard Ashton's son, J. Richard Ashton, and his wife Wenda ran the School from 1960, when, among many gifted artists, Ian Chapman and Archibald Prize winner Francis Giacco attended, until 1977 when Phillip Ashton (Richard's son) became Principal, this being the time of Haydn Wilson, political cartoonist Bill Leak and artist Paul Newton.
In 1988 the school was incorporated and Paul Delprat, Julian Ashton's great-grandson, himself an ex-student took over the running of the school, becoming the current Principal. In 1989 the school's antique casts and easels, which date back to 1890, were classified by the National Trust. The school's main campus is in The Rocks, Sydney, located opposite the Museum of Contemporary Art. Since 2004 the school has also conducted classes at Headland Park, Georges Heights, Mosman.
The School currently offers: The Sir William Dobell, Brett Whiteley, John Olsen, Thea Proctor, Portrait Artists Australia, Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts and The Art Express scholarships to encourage fine drawing and painting. Samuel Wade, a Brett Whiteley Scholarship winner at the school, went on to win the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Read more about this topic: Julian Ashton
Famous quotes containing the words julian, art and/or school:
“The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.””
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)