The Academia de las Nobles Artes de México (Academy of San Carlos, from 1781)

A royal academy of painting, sculpture and architecture in Mexico City whose instruction was free and whose evening rooms, lit by Argand lamps, held hundreds of pupils drawing from casts and copying designs for furniture and bronzes. The observer who described it in 1803 itemised the miners and merchants who paid for it and recorded that on its benches Indian, mestizo and white sat together in a city whose caste prejudice he called inveterate.