The principal aim of this course is to familiarize students with the history of British art from the Stuarts to the early Victorian era. Teaching will be conducted entirely on sites in London or its immediate vicinity. The course will begin with the elite patronage of the Stuart court and end with the development of public institutions of art from the mid-eighteenth century. The social significance of portraiture, the cult of antiquity, the art market and the rise of landscape will all be studied as themes. There will be a strong emphasis on the European sources of British visual culture and the emergence of a distinctive national tradition of painting from Hogarth through to Turner.