Atelier (atil-ya)
French, from the Old French astelier (bottega in Italian).
An atelier is simply the private working studio of a professional painter or sculptor.
In educational terms, it is the working studio of one who dedicates some time away from their own work, to train a limited number of select students; usually students seeking to pursue careers as professional artists.
The advantages of the atelier and apprenticeship environment are significant. One benefit is that the program is designed to address each individual's level of accomplishment and allows students to advance at their own pace.
The small environment and direct interaction with the painter or sculptor in his/her working studio, tends to encourage advanced participants to remain in the program building toward a peer relationship with the artist. As a result, the interaction between beginning and intermediate level students with increasingly advanced painters allows for an exchange of information, ideas, techniques and inspiration that can enhance the learning experience beyond the scope of the official curriculum outline. Separating students of different levels limits them to only the input of the instructor.
The training methods offered in the atelier tradition evolved from the apprentice system which, in the case of craftsmen and artisans, dates far back into ancient history. Apprenticeship training of fine artists dates back predominately to the Renaissance. A master painter or sculptor trained a group of apprentices until they were ready to work independently.
Renaissance bottegas were studio workshops where promising apprentices were accepted at an early age. Advanced apprentices and assistants worked with or under the guidance of the master to produce works of art commissioned by patrons.
The tradition whereby an individual fine artist devotes time to teaching can be traced through the "lineages" of some of the greatest masters of Western European Art.
While the larger, more structured Guild Schools and later Academies e.g. L'Ecole Des Beaux-Arts (akôl' da bozär'), and The Royal Academy, London) evolved from the apprentice tradition, ateliers continued to exist after their appearance. Ateliers met a unique need. Thus, ateliers were never supplanted by academies. However, the shift to modernism changed the focus and curriculum of surviving institutions in Western Europe and the United States.
Through natural attrition, and the evolution of faculty trained as modernists, centers of art education reinvented themselves. They began offering a non-objective curriculum. Training in hands-on traditional methods and techniques, and concern for archival grade materials was rejected and replaced by theoretical and conceptual approaches to art education.
The historic training that had passed from generation to generation, forming the foundation for the continuous evolution of artistic movements through the centuries was nearly lost.
The more intimate, private atelier setting came close to disappearing. Visual art training virtually left the studio and centered predominately in art colleges and university art departments. Systematic teaching and learning was no longer applicable. The nature of "art" itself was perceived as an intangible -- subject to individual interpretation.
The Atelier system was never totally replaced, thanks to a handful of devoted realists who carried the tradition through the 20th century. Today, as a result of their commitment, students of realist art can study under draftsmen and traditionally trained painters and sculptors in smaller studio settings, as well as through larger dedicated schools and academies in the US and Europe.
Adrian Gottlieb
"The Florentine bottega of Ghirlandaio... produced an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo, while at the beginning of the seventeenth century the...gifted Antony Van Dyck was working with Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp. In more recent times the young John Singer Sargent went to study at the atelier of Carolus-Duran in Paris. Despite the emergence of the Academy in which different teachers teach different subjects, it has long been recognised that the apprentice and atelier systems produce the best painters."
From the website of Charles Cecil Studios, a Studio School in the Naturalist Tradition, Florence, Italy
Wikipedia Link: Atelier Methods
GottliebStudios.com/Classical_Glossary