Includes bibliographical references (p. 469-472) and index.

Introduction: CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM -- NEW WORLD FRONTIERS -- REALISM AND NATURALISM -- MODERN ART AND LIFE -- Thomas Crow -- Brian Lukacher -- Francis K. Pohl -- David Llewellyn -- Linda Nochlin -- Critical art and history -- Patriotism and virtue: David to the young Ingres ; Classicism in crisis: Gros to Delacroix / Tensions of enlightenment: Goya -- Visionary history painting: Blake and his contemporaries ; Nature and history in English romantic landscape painting ; Landscape art and romantic nationalism in Germany and America ; Architecture unshackled, 1790-1851 / Old world, new world : the encounter of cultures on the American frontier ; Black and white in America / The generation of 1830 and the crisis in the public sphere -- Rhetoric of realism : Courbet and the origins of the avant-garde -- Photography, modernity, and art / The decline of history painting : Germany, Italy, and France -- Architecture and design in the age of industry -- Manet and the Impressionists -- Issues of gender in Cassatt and Eakins / Mass culture and Utopia : Seurat and Neoimpressionism -- The appeal of modern art: Toulouse-Lautrec -- Abstraction and populism : Van Gogh -- Symbolism and the dialectics of retreat -- The failure and success of Câezanne.