The St. Louis School of Fine Arts was founded as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts in 1879 as part of Washington University in St. Louis, and has continuously offered visual arts and sculpture education since then. Its purpose-built building stood in downtown St. Louis on Lucas Place.
After about 25 years of operation, in 1909, a legal conflict over funding split the organization into two parts: the school and its art collection, which remained part of privately held Washington University, and a public civic art museum, which became the Saint Louis Art Museum.
The art school moved to the university campus. With changes of name and location on campus, it continued operations up until 2006 when the school was incorporated into the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, which spans graduate and undergraduate arts curriculum, graduate and undergraduate schools of architecture, and the university's art collection in its Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.