Program Overview

Program Details

The Courtauld Institute of Art offers a range of programs in the history, conservation, curation, and business of art.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programs

The institute provides world-renowned undergraduate and postgraduate programs, focusing on various aspects of art, including history, conservation, and curation.

Short Courses

The Courtauld Institute of Art offers 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

Not Room Enough: American Art Beyond the City

Course Description

In his 1836 'Essay on American Scenery', the artist Thomas Cole lamented that "the ravages of the axe are daily increasing – the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation." The very next year, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave voice to a growing counter-urban sentiment in the young United States, holding that "We need nature, and cities give the human senses not room enough." The followers of Cole and Emerson in American art established a fascinating tradition of place-based practice by artists who chose to keep their distance from the urban art world and to make rural subjects their commitment.

The painters who are the focus of this course consciously isolated themselves from the lofts and galleries of New York City, even as they continued to depend on its booming market, which did not always know how to handle their creations. Case studies will include the inhabited landscape paintings of the so-called Hudson River School; the regionalism of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry; the politically engaged counter-regionalism of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows; Georgia O'Keeffe's rural modernism between the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the New Mexico desert; and perhaps the most extreme example of iconoclastic commitment to the brutal realities of the rural, Andrew Wyeth. Students will come away from this course conversant in many of the key contributors to the history of American art and the wider structures in which they participated.

Course Details

• 5 pre-recorded lectures with 5 Zoom seminars at 18:30, over 5 weeks from Thursday 22 October to Thursday 19 November 2026
• £245

Lecturer's Biography

Dr William L. Coleman

Dr William L. Coleman is a specialist in American landscape art and serves as the inaugural Wyeth Foundation Director of the Wyeth Study Center, dividing responsibilities between the Brandywine Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine, USA. Current projects include two nationally traveling exhibitions with scholarly publications he has edited: By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth and Rockwell Kent: The Work of Art. After a 2008 Courtauld master's, he earned a master's in musicology at Oxford and a doctorate from Berkeley and held postdoctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Washington University in St. Louis.