A key characteristic of art and visual culture in the nineteenth century is the focus on documents, facts, and the material properties of things - a kind of visual positivism, as it were. This combined with a new cult of the imagination, and in the work of some artists and writers painstaking descriptions of objects oscillated with the symbolic and narrative associations they called up. Fantasies about history and the classical world mingled with an attention to the urban environment and the proliferating commodities of the industrial revolution. We shall explore these preoccupations as they played out in the various tendencies associated with the pictorial imagination of the nineteenth century - classicism, romanticism, and realism - putting particular emphasis on the situation in France. We shall be exploring the interplay between the factual and the imaginary, and between description and narration, as manifested in the fine arts as well as in popular illustration,fashion, and photography. We shall consider the combination of novelty and repetition that characterized artistic processes during the period in relation to modes of manufacture and marketing. The gendering of material objects and media in the nineteenth century is another theme we shall consider. Among the artists we will be studying are Boilly, Ingres, Gericault, Delacroix, Daguerre, Daumier, Gavarni, Delaroche, Courbet, Degas, and Atget. Theoretical texts include Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; Karl Marx, Capital; and Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail, as well as some more recent interventions in the field.