Program Overview

Europe and the World: Encounters in Art

Course Description

This course focuses on the art and visual culture that resulted from the encounter between European artists and Asia, Africa, and the Americas, produced between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries.

The materials in this area are astonishingly rich. They include depictions of non-European people by renowned painters such as Dürer, Titian, Anthony Van Dyck, and Johann Zoffany, the drawings of flora and fauna recorded by colonial artists working abroad, and the picturesque views of India and the South Seas produced by Captain Cook's landscapists, William Hodges and John Webber. Early ethnographic images and so-called paintings reflected new ideas about racial difference and the origins of humankind, even as they continued to express a strong sense of European superiority. The ivories made by sixteenth-century African carvers for Portuguese clients, and Rembrandt's responses to Mughal miniatures, reveal the deep interest that discerning Europeans had in the knowledge and skill of foreign artists.

Works that address slavery and related forms of exploitation represent the most challenging aspect of this story, one that we will also engage with critically in our discussions.

Course Details

• 10 pre-recorded lectures with 5 Zoom seminars at 18:30, over 5 weeks from Wednesday 4 November to Wednesday 2 December 2026.
• Tuition fee: £395

Lecturer's Biography

Dr. Thomas Balfe is an art historian specializing in early modern (c.1550–c.1750) northern European easel painting and the graphic arts. His main research areas are seventeenth-century animal, hunting, fable, and food still-life imagery. His co-edited book on the term ad vivum and its relation to images made from or after the life was published in 2019. He is currently working on a long-term writing project that focuses on European depictions of hunting practices in the Americas, Asia, and the Arctic.

Short Courses

Overview

The Courtauld Institute offers a range of short courses, including:

• Study Tours
  • Built upon Waters: The Sea in Venetian Art from Tintoretto to Canaletto
  • Bloomsbury in Sussex
  • Munich Moderns – May 2026
  • Ravenna: Capital of the Mosaic
  • Vienna 1900: A Total Work of Art – May 2026
  • NEW Medieval Exeter and Devon
  • Munich Moderns – September 2026
  • Vienna 1900: A Total Work of Art – September 2026
  • NEW Eighteenth-Century Idylls: A Study Tour of the 'Matchless Vale' of the Thames
  • NEW Disegno: Workshop Tradition, Concept, and Living Practice – A Study Tour to Pisa
  • Uptown, Midtown, Downtown: An Art-Historical Tour of New York City
  • NEW Masterpieces of Early-Modern Spain: A Study Tour to Madrid and Toledo
• Summer School
  • Summer School online
    • 2- NEW Philip Guston and Twentieth-Century American Art
    • 3- Carlo Crivelli and His Contemporaries
    • 4- Nature, Gender, Form: New Approaches to the Pre-Raphaelites
  • Summer School on campus
    • 5- The Rise and Fall of the 'High Renaissance'
    • 6-Re-Imagining the Everyday: Genre Paintings and Prints in Sixteenth-to Eighteenth-century Europe
    • 7-Rococo to Revolution: Histories of French Art
    • 8-Collectors, Exhibitions and Art Dealers: Modern Art in Europe
    • 9- NEW- Post-War German Art and the Question of National Identity
    • 10- Venezianità: The Art of Being Venetian in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
    • 18-Bright Lights and Dark Visions: Nordic Art from the Danish Golden Age to Edvard Munch
    • 21- NEW Beauty, Luxury, and Power: The Arts of the Mughal Empire
    • 23- A Nervous State of Affairs: Art in Vienna
    • 17-NEW Modernity and the Female Body in late 19th-Century Paris
    • 20 – The Byzantine World: the Arts of the East Roman Empire from the Fourth to the Fifteenth Centuries
    • 12-Constructing the Heart of Empire: London's Public Architecture
    • 15-The Art of the Crusades
    • 11- On the Roof of the World: An Introduction to the Art and Architecture of Tibet and the Himalayas
    • 14-NEW From Rodin to Hepworth: The Emergence of Modern Sculpture in London and Paris
    • 13-Fathers of Modern Art: Manet and Cézanne
    • 24-Unruly Britannia: The Brit Art Renaissance of
    • 22-NEW War and Peace in Netherlandish Art, 1500–1700
    • 19-NEW Art and Audacity: Women in Modernism c.1905–1925
    • 16-NEW In Pursuit of Fame: Art and Patronage in Baroque Rome
• Spring School
  • Variations on a Theme: Modernism in Art and Music
  • Making Sense of Art History: The Fundamentals
  • NEW- Making Sense of Christian Art: Key Figures, Style and Contexts
  • "The Root of Everything" – Drawing in Europe from the Renaissance to the Modern Period
  • Looking at Ourselves: A Historical and Practical Exploration of Portrait Photography
• Autumn School
  • Making Sense of the Arts of Islam: An Introduction
  • Making Sense of 'The Classical' in Art
  • Making Sense of Modern and Contemporary Art: The Pleasures of Looking
  • Variations on a Theme: Art & Music in Early Baroque Europe
  • National Socialist, "Degenerate", Émigré and Looted Art: The Aesthetics, Economics and Ethics of Art in the Third Reich
  • The Art of the Sacred in Byzantium and Italy: Materiality and Meaning
• Evening Study at the Courtauld
  • Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII
  • ARCHIVE: The Emergence of Modern Sculpture in Paris and London, 1890 – 1930
  • ARCHIVE: The Long Road to Success: Giulio Romano between Rome and Mantua
  • The Fear and the Fury: Abstract Expressionism
  • NEW- The Arts of the Aztec Empire
  • NEW The Materiality of Modern and Contemporary Painting in Five Chapters
  • Making Sense of Ideas on Art: Image theories from G.W.F. Hegel to Horst Bredekamp
  • Variations on a Theme: The Renaissance in Art and Music
  • NEW Not Room Enough: American Art Beyond the City
  • Europe and the World: Encounters in Art
  • NEW Digging up the Past: Collecting Antiquities and Paleo-Christian Relics in Early-Modern Rome
  • Magnificent Women: Elite Female Agency and the Arts of Medieval Europe
  • Intersecting Practices: Architecture and the Figurative Arts in Early Modern Italy
• Showcasing Art History
  • Ocean Tales – The Sea as Motif from the 18th Century to the Present
  • When Artworks Live: Performance in the Visual Arts
• Saturday Study
  • Seurat's Seascapes: Dr Karen Serres and Dr Anne Puetz in Conversation