Our story begins with Florence
Daniel Graves founded The Florence Academy of Art in 1991 with a handful of students in a small studio in the gardens of a Florentine palace. He chose Florence to surround them with some of the greatest artwork in history. This daily encounter with beauty naturally influences the students’ work, as they look to examples from the past to learn the language of classical art and endeavour to understand how the masters created works of such universal significance. Today, the school is housed in a 35,000 square foot former customs house, just outside the city center, a short walk from the Arno River and the monuments of Florence. The antique structure, with its soaring ceilings and abundant natural light, has been transformed into a campus for realism: 30 north lit classrooms, a gallery, library, cafe, private studios for faculty and apartments for visiting artists. In 2007, the Florence Academy opened a branch campus in Mölndal, Sweden, and in 2020, inaugurated the Master of Arts in Studio Art.
“I am not part of a post contemporary movement. I am connected to a tradition that never ever stopped.”
– Daniel Graves, Founder
What is
The FAA?
Students who apply to The Florence Academy of Art seek the language of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Titian and Sargent, and the tools to convey their ideas with confidence through the oil or clay mediums. A common visual aesthetic draws them to the classical world (and its renaissance in Florence) to build an artistic vocabulary where beauty and humanity are intrinsic to art. When students walk in the door of the Florence Academy, they are assigned a north light studio space, and settle into a rhythm of working that will remain constant throughout their years of study: half the day working from the figure, half of the day on specific exercises in their studios, and in the evenings attending lessons in Anatomy, Art History, materials & techniques.