1845 in art

Events

• February 7 – At the British Museum in London, a drunken visitor smashes the Portland Vase which takes months to repair. It has since been reconstructed three times.
• March – Honoré Daumier begins publishing the series of drawings Les Gens de justice in the satirical Paris magazine Le Charivari.
• April – The National Gallery in London purchases for £630 a portrait of a man with a skull as a work by Hans Holbein the Younger. Its authenticity is rapidly called into question, leading to a public scandal. It is determined in 1993 to have been painted more than a decade after Holbein's death, perhaps by Michiel Coxie.
• May 5 – The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1845 opens at the National Gallery in London.
• unknown dates
• *Heinrich Hoffmann anonymously publishes Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren in Germany.
• *Brita Sofia Hesselius opens a photography studio in Karlstad, making her the first known Swedish female professional photographer.

  Works

• Francis Grant – Self-Portrait
• George Hayter - The Christening of the Prince of Wales
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Portrait of Comtesse d'Haussonville
• Charles Landseer – The Eve of the Battle of Edgehill
• Jan August Hendrik Leys – Franz Floris se rendant a une fête
• Adolph Menzel – The Balcony Room
• Andrew Morton – The United Service
• William Mulready – Choosing [the Wedding Gown]
• John Partridge – Portrait of Lord Palmerston
• Nicolaas Pieneman – Portrait of Jan Jacob Rochussen
• Édouard Pingret – The Arrival of [King Louis Philippe at Windsor Castle]
• William Ranney – The Battle of Cowpens
• Pierre-Henri Révoil completed by Michel Philibert Genod – Pharamond lifted on a shield by the Franks
• Théodore Rousseau – Hoarfrost
• Joseph Severn – Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath
• Clarkson Stanfield – The Capture of the El Gamo
• John Mix Stanley – Buffalo Hunt on the Southwestern Prairies
• January Suchodolski – Assault on Saragossa
• J. M. W. Turner
• * The Arrival of Louis-Philippe at Portsmouth
• * ''Sunrise with Sea Monsters''

  Births

• January 21 – Harriet Backer, Norwegian painter
• July 4 – Edmonia Lewis, American sculptor
• October 1 – Adolf Oberländer, German caricaturist
• October 30 – Antonin Mercié, French sculptor and painter
• undated
• *Charles Burton Barber, English genre painter
• *Alina Forsman, Finnish sculptor

  Deaths

• January 4 – Léopold Boilly, French painter
• January 5 – Robert Smirke, English painter
• January 21 – Samuel Colman, English painter
• April 20 – Thomas Phillips, English portrait and subject painter
• May 15 – Kapiton Zelentsov, Russian painter notable for his illustrations for books
• July 29 – François Joseph Bosio, French sculptor
• September 29 – John Scarlett Davis, English painter
• October 30 – Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, French designer and painter, especially of military subjects
• November 24 – Karl Wilhelm Wach, German painter
• date unknown
• *Fryderyk Bauman, Polish architect and sculptor-decorator
• *Yakov Kolokolnikov-Voronin – Russian portraitist and icon-painter
• probable – Thomas Douglas Guest, British portrait painter