1839 in art

Events

• January 9 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.
• January 25 – H. Fox Talbot shows his "photogenic drawings" at the Royal Institution in London.
• May 6 – The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1839 opens at the National Gallery in London
• c. October – Robert Cornelius takes a daguerreotype self-portrait, the earliest known existing photographic portrait of a human in America.
• Honoré de Balzac's novel Pierre Grassou concerns an artist who lives off forgeries.

Works

• Jean Alaux – The Battle of Denain
• John Bell – Babes in the Wood
• Giovanni Battista Borghesi – Portrait of Marie Louise
• Sara Anne Bright – The Leaf
• Johan Christian Dahl – View of Dresden by Moonlight
• Eugène Delacroix – Jewish Wedding in Morocco
• Francis Grant – A Shooting Party at Ranton Abbey
• Francesco Hayez – Reclining Odalisque
• George Hayter – The Coronation of Queen Victoria
• Eugène Isabey – The Battle of Texel
• Johann Peter Krafft – The Declaration of Victory After the Battle of Leipzig
• Jean-Charles Langlois – The Battle of Smolensk
• Edwin Landseer –
• * Dignity and Impudence
• * Isaac van Amburgh and his Animals
• Charles-Philippe Larivière – The Battle of Castillon
• Henri Lehmann – Portrait of Franz Liszt
• Charles Robert Leslie – Dulcinea del Toboso
• Daniel Maclise
• * Portrait of Charles Dickens
• * Robin Hood and His Merry Men Entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest
• John Martin – The Coronation of Queen Victoria
• William Mulready
• * Fair Time
• * The Sonnet
• Thomas Phillips
• * Portrait of the Earl of Egremont
• * Portrait of Thomas Arnold
• Carl Spitzweg – The Poor Poet
• J. M. W. Turner
• *
• * Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino
• * Cicero at His Villa at Tusculum
• * The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838
• Peter von Hess – The Entry of King Otto of Greece into Athens
• David Wilkie – Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tipoo Sahib
• William Wyon – ''Una and the Lion''

Births

• January 19 – Paul Cézanne, French painter
• March 16 – John Butler Yeats, Irish painter
• May 24 – Arthur Quartley, painter
• June 9 – Joseph Paelinck, Belgian painter
• September 1 – Charles Edward Perugini, English painter
• October 2 – Hans Thoma, German painter
• October 29 – Kate Dickens Perugini, English painter
• October 30 – Alfred Sisley, French impressionist painter
• November 16 – William De Morgan, English ceramic artist
• November 20 – Christian Wilberg, painter date unknown – François Sallé, French realist painter

Deaths

• January 12 – Joseph Anton Koch, Austrian painter of the German Romantic movement
• January 14 – John Wesley Jarvis, American painter
• January 28 – Sir William Beechey, English portrait painter
• February 6 – François Louis Thomas Francia, French shorescape watercolorist
• February 8 – Giovanni Cendramini, Italian painter and engraver
• February 21 – John Charles Felix Rossi, English sculptor
• June 2 – Wijnand Nuijen, Dutch land- and seascape painter
• June 4 – Cornelia Scheffer, Dutch painter and portrait miniaturist
• July 8 – John Laporte, English landscape painter and etcher
• September 4 – Hendrik Voogd, Dutch painter and printmaker active in Italy
• September 10 – Pieter Fontijn, Dutch painter and drawer
• September 30 – John Thirtle, English watercolour painter and frame-maker
• November 15 – Giocondo Albertolli, Swiss-born architect, painter and sculptor active in Italy
• December – William Sadler, Irish landscape painter
• December 22 – Cornelis van Spaendonck, Dutch painter date unknown – Paolo Vincenzo Bonomini, Italian portrait and caricature painter