Teaching yourself art history online, one week at a time

When I started reading art history seriously, I had no teacher and no syllabus, only a library card and a habit of following footnotes. It worked, slowly. These days the same curiosity can go a great deal further, because the major museums have put their collections online, free sites publish careful short essays, and some museums and universities offer structured courses you can take from a kitchen table.

The hard part is no longer finding material. It is choosing, and keeping going. What follows is a way to build your own course in art history from free and low-cost resources, with a sample twelve-week plan, and some thoughts on what an online course can and cannot do.

What is out there, and what each kind is good for

Online art history comes in a few broad kinds. They are useful for different things, and the best self-taught plans mix them.

Kind of resource	Good for	Watch out for
Museum collection websites	Seeing works in high resolution, reading labels and dates, finding what a gallery actually holds	Entries can be brief; images flatten texture and scale
Free essay and video sites	Short, reliable introductions to a work, a movement or a period	Uneven coverage; less on Australian art than on European art
Structured online courses	A sequence to follow, weekly prompts, a reason to keep going	Course line-ups change; some materials sit behind paid tiers
Books and catalogues	Depth, argument, footnotes to follow	Takes longer; needs a library or a budget
Visits to real galleries	Scale, surface, colour as it really is	Needs time and travel, but nothing replaces it

Museum collection websites

Start here, because it is free and it is primary material. The National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the other state galleries all have searchable online collections, as do the big international museums. A collection entry gives you the title, date, medium, dimensions and credit line, and often a short text by a curator. Some let you zoom in far enough to see brushwork and canvas weave.

Collection sites are best used with a question in mind. Search a painter you like and sort the results by date, so you see the work change over a career. Or search a single year and see what was being made across the collection at once.

Free essays, videos and reference sites

Smarthistory is a free, non-profit art history site founded by the art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, with thousands of short essays and videos by scholars. Its coverage is broad and its writing is clear, which makes it a good place to fill in the background to a movement before you look at the Australian side of the story. Google Arts and Culture gathers images and online exhibitions from many museums, including some in Australia.

For Australian artists specifically, Design and Art Australia Online, a biographical dictionary hosted by the University of New South Wales, is useful for checking dates and careers, especially for less well known names.

Structured online courses

Coursera hosts courses from museums and universities, and several deal with art and art history. One example is The Museum of Modern Art's Modern Art & Ideas, a self-paced introductory course built around themes and works in that museum's collection. Course line-ups on any platform change over time: courses are added, revised and withdrawn, and the access options (what is free to view, what needs a paid plan) change too. Read the current course page before you plan around one.

Choosing a course

A course is worth your time if it gives you a structure you would not have built yourself. Before enrolling, check a few things on the course page:

• Who made it. Is it a museum, a university, an individual? Who are the instructors, and what is their background?
• What it covers. A course on modern art from a New York museum will be built from that museum's collection. That is a strength, but it means you will see very little Australian painting, so plan to add your own.
• How long it takes, honestly. Look at the weekly hours estimate and halve your optimism. A short course you finish is more useful than a long one you abandon in week three.
• What is free and what is paid. Platforms change these arrangements, so read the current terms rather than relying on what a friend did a year ago.
• Whether there are readings or only videos. Courses that point you to essays, collection pages and further reading teach you how to keep going after they end.

I would not choose a course for what it promises to do for you afterwards. Choose it because the subject interests you and the structure suits the way you learn.

Building your own syllabus

A course gives you a frame, but you can build one yourself just as well. The key is to set a small, fixed amount of work for each week, and to tie every week's reading to looking.

A sample twelve-week plan

Here is a worked example for someone who wants to understand Australian painting from the colonial period to the late twentieth century, at about two to three hours a week.

1. Week 1. Read the opening chapter of a general survey history (the shelf of art books on Australian painting suggests several). Pick three colonial landscape paintings on a state gallery collection website and write down what you notice before you read their labels.
2. Week 2. The Heidelberg School. Read a short essay on Impressionism in Europe, then look at a handful of Australian plein-air paintings online. Note one way they resemble the European work and one way they do not.
3. Week 3. Women painters of the early twentieth century. Search a state gallery collection for three painters you have not heard of before.
4. Week 4. Early modernism. Read about Cubism and Post-Impressionism on a free essay site, then look for Australian paintings from the 1920s and 1930s that show those ideas arriving.
5. Week 5. Aboriginal art. Read the first chapters of a survey that treats it as central, and spend time with the National Gallery of Australia's collection pages.
6. Week 6. A rest week. Visit a real gallery and look at one painting for twenty minutes.
7. Week 7. The 1940s. Look at how painters responded to war and to the inland.
8. Week 8. Abstraction and the 1950s and 1960s. Read the essay on John Olsen and compare two of his works from different decades on collection sites.
9. Week 9. Print and paper. Search for prints and drawings by painters you have met so far.
10. Week 10. Photography and new media in the 1970s and later.
11. Week 11. Choose one painter from the whole course and read everything you can find in a library.
12. Week 12. Write a one-page note on that painter in your own words, as if for a friend.

None of this needs to happen in order, and you can stretch any week into three. The point is that every week has one reading and one act of looking.

A looking habit alongside the reading

Screens are good for information and poor for paintings. A digital image tells you the composition and the colour, roughly. It does not tell you how big the painting is, how thick the paint sits, or what the surface does when you move a step to the left. Reading about art without looking at it in person becomes a kind of trivia.

So set yourself a looking habit. Once a fortnight, or once a month, spend an hour in a real gallery: a state gallery, a regional gallery, a university collection, a commercial show. The guide to looking at a painting slowly has a simple method for staying with one work for ten minutes or more. If you live in Sydney, the guide to visiting exhibitions in Sydney is a good way to find more paintings to stand in front of, and most commercial shows are free to walk into.

Keeping notes that you will actually use

Notes are what turn browsing into learning. Mine are simple and paper-based, though the same system works in any notes app.

• One page per work, with the title, artist, date, medium, size and where you saw it, online or in person. Then three or four lines on what you noticed, written before you read anything about it.
• One page per artist, added to over time: dates, places, teachers, friends, and the works you have seen.
• A running list of questions. Every time something puzzles you, write it down. Most of my best reading has come from that list.
• A small timeline. A long strip of paper on the wall, or a single document, where you place artists and works as you meet them. Seeing the 1890s and the 1950s side by side on one strip changes how you think about both.

Keep a note of where each fact came from. If you are working from a collection page, write down the gallery and the date you looked. If it was a book, note the page. When two sources disagree, as they sometimes do about dates and titles, you will know where to check.

When the plan stalls

It will, usually around week five. That is normal. Go back to the looking, which is the part most people enjoy, and let the reading wait a fortnight. Or swap your plan for a course for a while, and let someone else set the pace. Art history is a long subject with no exam at the end, and the only real way to fail at teaching it to yourself is to stop being curious about what you see.