What Ivy League school offers the best undergraduate history of art program?

Thank you all for your answers. They are very helpful.

The Ivies, and certainly Harvard, Yale, Columbia, & Princeton all have great Art History programs, and I would think anyone who could win admission to one of those schools could hardly go wrong. I would incline toward Columbia, as much for the fact it is in the middle of one of the world's greatest art centers as for any other reason. All Art History programs, including Columbia, will involve looking at lots of art on a screen, but being able to stand a few feet away from great works of art of every era and culture and examine them in detail is an advantage that would be hard to overstate. Just as significant would be the opportunities to intern and work in the "industry" of Fine Art. New York has probably the world's greatest concentration of museums, auction houses, galleries, and conservators, not to mention being a kind of museum in itself of the related field of Architecture. Scotland is a great place, with wonderful art and art history, and London, with its immense art holdings and resources, is a few hours away, but those miles might seem like light years to a busy undergraduate. Columbia is minutes away, by bus, subway, or foot, from the whole world of art.

I'd have to go with Columbia, simply because it is located in a city that is one of the world's artistic hubs. You'll have plenty of opportunity to look at historic works in the "flesh," and you'll also have access to both the commercial and non-profit galleries that show the work that will be part of tomorrow's art history lessons.

Brown or Yale, though I think Brown probably wins due to the large number of RISD courses available to you as a Brown undergraduate. St. Andrews would also be a wonderful place to study this subject matter, as would be Oxford.

I think this question deserves to be unpacked a little.  Ranking graduate programs is pretty straightforward -- see links below -- but ranking undergraduate programs is a trickier question. Graduate work is all about specialization, so the options are clear. You need to secure the patronage of an advisor who will support your work in that field. Certain universities may or may not have a faculty member working in that area.  Let's say you wanted to do a PhD in British art: you would certainly apply to Yale, but most places (in the US!) might not have anyone at all doing British art. However, this is arguably the wrong way to go about rating undergrad programs. Undergraduate work (in the US) is all about breadth, both breadth of courses in the major, but then also general-education or core courses outside.  Undergraduate is the last time you will be taking courses in Islamic and American and Oceanic and Northern Renaissance art, so you would want to be somewhere that is good at a lot of fields.  And moreover, it's the last time you will be taking classes in philosophy and sociology and literature and history, so you want strength there too. Undergrad is where some of the basic elements of your worldview will fall into place, so you want to be stretched there -- whether that's from Derrida or Steven Pinker or Gary Becker or Judith Butler -- not to mention dorm-room debates with CS majors and so forth. So for breadth of art history, you could try to find the school with the largest permanent art history faculty (I think Columbia or NYU). For overall worldview, you could look for the overall sharpest undergraduates (maybe Harvard). Then again, for undergrad it might be worth going somewhere where the faculty will actually teach you rather than delegate the job to teaching assistants (i.e. Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore). Then again, many will tell you that truly the best art history education is grounded on the most hours spent in the best museums, so you would want to be in New York or at the University of London. Traditionally the Courtauld is a stronghold of art history in the UK, but certainly Oxford would merit consideration on the "sharpest undergraduates" criterion. I'm no UK expert though. Which graduate programs are strongest over all? NRC rankings   http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=5204 http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=3013 http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-History/124737/ Programs  by number of PhDs granted per year   http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=483 Which graduate programs are strongest in a particular subfield i.e. 18th-century art? Dissertations  by subfield:  http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations/277/in_progress Programs  ranked by subfield:       http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=484

St. Andrews University is quite a good choice for such a programme but I'm not very sure which Ivy League university will have the best course for that!