This course considers the linked arts of the United States, the U.K, and France in the period between 1865 and 1918 looking at specific case study artists, structures, social movements, and literary works. We will focus on the arts and institutions endorsed by the patronage class and the bourgeoisie, and equally, works of art and literature designed to critique, parody, and correct the architecture, manners, and activities of the era’s transatlantic elite.

Artists we consider include Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, James McN. Whistler, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Mary Cassatt; sculptors Augustus St. Gaudens and Harriet Hosmer; designers William Morris, Beatrix Ferrand, Frederick Law Olmsted, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Hector Guimard, and Louis Comfort Tiffany; architects Charles Rennie Macintosh, Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan; photographers, Eadweard Muybridge, Frances B. Johnston, and Lewis Hine. We will also consider aesthetic theorists, political cartoons, international expositions, and the work of Pomo and Zuni artisans. We will look at spaces as disparate as the new urban parks designed for leisure and the vast new coal mines developed to facilitate the electrification of cities and the fabrication of steel rails and I-beams to build railroads and support skyscrapers.

This course fulfills the following Major requirements: Geographical area (A) or (C) and Chronological period (III), based on the topic of the final research paper or project.