BA Art History and History

This course introduces students to nineteenth-century British art. Our special focus is on such art’s engagement with the other-than-human world. In a period which witnessed both the height of industrialisation and the emergence of modern environmentalism, artists, art-writers, and scientists alike explored radically new visions of ‘nature’ and our place within it. Moving between contemporary ecocritical approaches and their Romantic and Victorian antecedents (including the nineteenth-century idea of ‘ecology’), we trace nineteenth-century artists’ engagements and collaborations with the other-than-human world across media. 

The course is structured roughly chronologically and takes in a range of artforms, from printmaking, photography, and painting to scientific illustration, collage, and design. It introduces key artists active across the century, from J.M.W. Turner and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Evelyn De Morgan. We will engage a broad range of themes relevant to British art’s environmental and ecological entanglements, ranging from colonialism, pollution, and resource extraction, to non-normative genders and sexualities and alternative spiritualities.

1) introduce students to key artists (both canonical and non-canonical) active in Britain in the nineteenth century, and their art’s engagement with ‘nature’ and the environment, especially ‘ecologies’ (as defined in unit description below).

2) provide a nuanced and advanced understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which nineteenth-century artworks were made, from the scientific to the gendered.

3) facilitate students’ development of nuanced and historically sensitive critical-thinking skills for approaching topics such as ecology, gender, sexuality, colonialism, ‘nature’, and human and other-than-human relations.

4) equip students with essential analytical tools and frameworks for approaching and crafting analyses of historical art, including the ability to appropriately engage primary and secondary sources.

Syllabus (indicative curriculum content):  

Weekly topics covered may include: 

1) Green Romanticisms (Romanticism) 

2) Industrialism, cataclysm, time (Romanticism) 

3) Botany and colonial collecting (science and art) 

4) Truth to nature (Pre-Raphaelitism) 

5) Excavation and extraction (Pre-Raphaelitism) 

6) Transmission and the oceanic (Spiritualist art) 

7) Queer Darwinisms (Aestheticism) 

8) Pollution and atmosphere (Aestheticism) 

9) Vital energies and living matter (Aestheticism) 

10) Decadent ecologies and decay (Decadence) 

11) Utopia and Environmentalisms (Arts & Crafts) 

This is a lecture-based course unit (22 x 1h), with additional seminars (11 x1h) designed to encourage directed readings, groupwork, and in-class exercises. Teaching and set readings, for which students are expected to prepare to discuss, will provide students with essential knowledge and important transferrable skills. Up to three of the seminars will be used for in-situ teaching in Manchester-based gallery settings (locations tbc, but might include the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, and the Science Museum), to further encourage visual-analytical skills and provide key context for nineteenth-century art spaces. Formative and summative written assignments, directed reading, and independent research activities are all designed to achieve the unit’s key outcomes.

Have knowledge of the art produced by a wide range of artists in Britain c. 1800–1900, including key movements such as Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism, and the Arts & Crafts Movement.

Recognise and discuss the importance of ecologies, ecological thinking, and the environment to nineteenth-century British art across media.

Have an understanding of relevant sociopolitical and cultural contexts underlying the production of nineteenth-century art.

Analyse and interpret artworks.

Critically evaluate and use primary and secondary sources related to art-making and broader relevant socio-political contexts.

Develop, construct, and articulate an original argument in writing about artworks based in visual analysis and research.

Build an effective argument through detailed visual analysis.

Critically analyse historical and contemporary texts from a variety of sources. 

Present ideas clearly.

Work towards deadlines and effectively manage tasks.

Respond positively to constructive feedback.

Construct and deliver a cohesive and coherent written argument.

Written feedback with opportunity for individual meeting after essay.

Written feedback after exam.