The heritage collections

The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded by Mazarin in 1648, was abolished by the Convention in 1793. The Academy's school, however, together with that of the Academy of Architecture, continued to exist, and in the Empire period the two came together as one institution which later became the Ecole des beaux-arts. It was located in a succession of different premises: the Louvre, then the Collège des Quatre Nations in the rue Mazarine, and finally, from 1829, on the site of the former Petits-Augustins convent in the rue Bonaparte.

The Ecole des beaux-arts inherited part of the collections of the Royal Academies, which were extremely varied in nature. They included the archives and inventories of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, engravings of a number of works painted for admission to it, books and drawings presented to the Academies or projects submitted for their approval, models collected for teaching purposes, works which had won the annual Prix de Rome or the various monthly competitions, assorted objects, and so on.
The aim of the library, which Vinet was responsible for organizing from 1862 to 1864, was to provide documentation and models for students in architecture, painting and sculpture. The variety of its iconography was therefore one of the hallmarks of the collection, which was made up of illustrated books, theoretical works, periodicals, prints, manuscripts, photographs and drawings.

The collections today house 120,000 books from the 16th to the 20th centuries (including 700 incunabula mainly donated by Masson) related to the teaching of architecture, painting, sculpture, drawing and engraving. The collections are accessible to those doing research projects of at least Masters level, and also to other people with the appropriate permission. Architecture is particularly well represented, with a large collection of books on theory, history, town planning, construction techniques and the typology of buildings as well as 40,000 drawings.

Master drawings make up a remarkable collection of nearly 15,000 works from the 16th to the 19th centuries where French, Italian and Northern Schools are well represented. There are 70,000 photographs dating mainly from 1850 to 1914, about 1,000 manuscripts inherited from the archives of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as well as 300 medieval illuminated manuscripts and approximately 100,000 prints.

The collection of paintings and sculptures (some 3,000 works) comprises student work for the Prix de Rome and various other competitions from the early 18th century to 1968, as well as a number of works formerly in the possession of the old Academies.

Paintings and sculpture

The collection of painting and sculpture (approximately 3,000 works) contains scholastic series, Rome prizes and works from other competitions dating from the 18th century to 1968, as well as a certain number of works, portraits and fragments from old academies. Artists include Honoré Fragonard, Jacques Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jacques Philippe Houdon, François Rude or Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. A number of medieval and renaissance sculpted works from Alexandre Lenoir's former Museum of Monuments were used by Duban to decorate the new Ecole des beaux-arts.

Master Drawings

This heart of this collections comes from the Academy collections, a large panorama of the study of the nude in the 17th and 18th centuries, to which diverse gifts, altogether almost 9, 000 pieces, some of which are exceptional, from the French, Italian, and Northern schools (Primatice, Jacques Callot, Le Brun, Nicolas Poussin, Théodore Géricault, Tintoretto, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Durer, Cranach, Rembrandt…).

Architectural drawings

The origins of this collection lie in the Royal Academy, with works by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézière, Marie-Joseph Peyre or Charles de Wailly, to which were added the Lesoufaché and Masson collections of 15th-18th century architectural and ornamental drawing. The 19th century architect holdings are often related to their study trips: Abel Blouet's mission in Morea or Jules Laurens trip to Persia. There are also several special, original archives, such as Louis-Auguste Boileau's series of metal architectural projects.

Prints

Nearly 100,000 prints from the 15th to the 19th century are organized by theme or by artist. This is an exemplary group of print production in France, in the North, and in Italy. It is largely made up of gifts and bequests: xylographs from the Masson collection, almost 25,000 engravings of ornaments and architecture from the Lesoufaché collection, numerous caricatures by Gavarni and Daumier from the Wasset collection, Théodore Géricault's entire output from the Armand Valton collection, several hundred engravings by Durer from the Gatteaux collection, but also a wide range of artists from the Schoëlcher and Cloquet collections. A contemporary collection has been established over the course of the years thanks to gifts from artists and teachers, and has just been augmented with 200 posters from May 68.

Photographs

The 70,000 photographs held at the Ensba date principally from 1850-1914. Mounted in the past on "mobile bindings," they have been thematically archived with the drawings and prints. There is a collection of reproductions of paintings and sculpture, but the topographic collection is more novel. It includes prints by Charles Marville, Edouard Baldus, Charles Nègre, Eugène Atget for French architecture, and a number of prints taken by French and foreign photographers in Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.
It is worth noting the Anatomy Department's collections, specialized in scientific photography, with work by Duchenne de Boulogne, Albert Londe, and Paul Richer.

Manuscripts

A collection of archives, including the archives of the Academy of painting and sculpture (legal proceedings, inventories, conferences, accounting paperwork from the former Royal Academy), as well as a certain number of pieces concerning life at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, or artistic life during the 19th century, Jacques-Louis David's papers, Charles Garnier's correspondence, unpublished memoirs from Rome, and around 300 painted manuscripts dating from the 12th to the 17th centuries, donated by the Masson family, and kept as a separate group.