ABSTRACT
This chapter will present the interconnected elements and conditions that led in the late 19th century to the formation of a National School of Fine Arts in Colombia. Although the official creation of the National School did not occur until 1886, the desire for a professional school was commonplace among local artists and some foreigners throughout the earlier 19th century. During the years prior to the establishment of the National School, there began to develop, especially in Bogotá, a process of artistic training and formation that was fueled by the traditions of colonial workshops, on the one hand, and the incipient academic efforts motivated by state and private educational initiatives, on the other. In this complex process, the active participation, at least since the 1840s, of foreign artists, such as the Mexican Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez, as well as that of local intellectuals, including the poet Rafael Pombo, and painters Ramon Torres Méndez, José María Espinosa, José Manuel Groot and Alberto Urdaneta was key.
The chapter also examines the transformations occurring in both public education and artisanal workshops and family traditions inherited from the colonial period. These transformations reinforced the need of academic professional training for artists who would achieve the desired economic and social emancipation of their trades. In this way, the chapter, through a study of specific cases, explores how local processes—related to older instructional models of the colonial workshops dating from the late 18th century—developed together alongside of newer, independent spaces and practices through the end of the 19th century; these were promoted by craftsmen, but especially painters, in whom the idea of creating a separate academic space for the arts was gaining strength and whose greatest materialization would be the foundation of the National School of Fine Arts.
