Art and Society in the 19th Century

Art and Society in the 19th Century

  • 19thC Introduction

Artists and Publics

  • 19thC Academies and Education
  • 19thC Artistic Identities
  • 19thC Exhibitions and Art Markets
  • 19thC Art and Mechanical Reproduction

Landscapes and People

  • 19thC Tourism and the Picturesque
  • 19thC Landscape and Nationalism
  • 19thC Class and Labour
  • 19thC Nature and Nationalism
  • 19thC Emergence of the Modern City

History and Modernity

  • 19thC The Functions of History Painting
  • 19thC The Historical Present
  • 19thC Portraiture: The Hero and the Sovereign
  • 19thC Ruskin and Revivalism
  • 19thC Baudelaire and Modernity

Gender and the Body

  • 19thC Women Artists
  • 19thC The Domestic Sphere
  • 19thC The Nude
  • 19thC Orientalism and Photography
  • 19thC Primitivism

Retrospective

  • 19thC Artists and Publics
  • 19thC Landscapes and People
  • 19thC History and Modernity
  • 19thC Gender and the Body

A Free Art History Course

My Free Art History Course project started in 2020 and the plan is to produce 250 45 minute YouTube videos with full lecturer notes summarising the history of Western art from cave painting to the present day by the end of 2026. The notes were initially researched and produced manually but, since 2023, the work has been increasingly automated using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. I still check the notes using various books and websites, particularly Wikipedia and the relevant museum or gallery but any mistakes are my own. The Infographics, the discussions and the expanding text boxes were produced by Google NotebookLM. The YouTube videos were recorded on a Mac mini M4 with a Nano Blue microphone and using an iPhone 15 Pro Max as the camera. I am trying to fully automate the process, a project I call The Automated Lecturer, but AI may not have advanced sufficiently to achieve this aim by the end of 2026. However, I now believe that by 2028 the whole project will be seen as a waste of time as an AI system will be able to do the research and give the talks in a friendly, informative and factual way that exceeds my best efforts. Ho hum, c'est la vie.

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Laurence Shafe, copyright 2020