Famous Artists School
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The Famous Artists School has offered correspondence courses in art since it was founded in 1948 in Westport, Connecticut, U.S.A. The idea was conceived by Albert Dorne as a result of a conversation with Norman Rockwell. He recruited Rockwell, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, Ben Stahl, Harold von Schmidt, Al Parker, Austin Briggs, Jon Whitcomb, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens, and John Atherton (all of whom were making more than US$50,000 a year at the time, roughly equivalent to US$425,000 in 2006[1]) to be the founding faculty of the school. Later faculty included cartoonists Al Capp, Milt Caniff and Rube Goldberg. Advisory faculty for the school later included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Fletcher Martin, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee.
The original courses offered were Painting, Illustration/Design and Cartooning. The Cartooning course was dropped in the 1980s. Each course consisted of 24 lessons, with a new lesson being mailed to the students each month. The student would complete the assignment and return it to the school, where a professional artist would critique it, and send suggestions back to the student. The original price for the three-year course (in 1948) was $300, payable in monthly installments, plus an estimated $11.55 for basic oil painting supplies. Famous Artists School focused squarely on realistic illustration and art, because it was teachable, and because it was what the public was interested in learning. As of 2006, the school offers four courses: Acrylic Painting; Oil and Watercolor Painting; Career Art, Illustration, & Design; and a Course for Talented Young People.
The Famous Artists School was well known in the 1950s and 1960s for its advertising on the back covers of comic books and on matchbook covers. The matchbooks had a drawing on the front cover, with the legend Draw me!. Information about the school was printed on the inside of the cover. These advertisements were often ridiculed and criticized as hucksterism. Despite this, the school is regarded as having provided solid training in the techniques of representational art and illustration. Cartoonists Lyman Anderson, Jay Disbrown, Graham Ingles, and Bernie Wrightson are alumni of the school.
The Famous Artists School was bought by Cortina Learning International in 1981, and is one of that company's line of correspondence schools.
