The "long nineteenth century" in Europe was a period of unprecedented artistic innovation. This course explores how visual artists responded to the massive social, political, and technological upheavals that shaped modern experience. Topics will include Romanticism's turn inward to the darker realms of the imagination (Goya, Blake); Realism and social reform (Courbet); Manet's " painting of modern life" in Paris; and the Impressionists' and Post-Impressionists' aesthetics of sensation and formal experiments with optical perception (Monet, Seurat).