1852 in art

Events

• February 5 – Hermitage Museum first opens to the public in Saint Petersburg.
• May 1 – The Salon of 1852 opens at the Palais-Royal in Paris
• May 3 – The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1852 opens at the National Gallery in London
• June 1 – The Hôtel Drouot is inaugurated in Paris as a fine art auction gallery.

Works

• Théodore Chassériau – Le Harem
• Frederic Edwin Church - The Natural Bridge, Virginia
• Edward William Cooke – San Giorgio Maggiore and the Salute, Venice
• Gustave Courbet
• * Village Damsels
• * A Girl Spinning
• Thomas Couture – Anselm Feuerbach
• Eugène Delacroix – Marphise
• Anselm Feuerbach – Hafiz at the Fountain
• William Powell Frith – The Bride of Lammermoor
• Jean-Léon Gérôme – The Idyll
• Francis Grant
• * Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli
• * Portrait of Sir Edwin Landseer
• Hiroshige – Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
• William Holman Hunt – English Coasts, 1852 ('Strayed Sheep')
• George Inness – A Bit of the Roman Aqueduct
• George Jones – Turner's Gallery; the Artist Showing his Work
• Alexander Kotzebue – The Battle of Zorndorf
• Frederic Leighton – The Death of Brunelleschi
• Charles Robert Leslie – Portrait of John Everett Millais
• John Martin – The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
• John Everett Millais
• * A Huguenot
• * Ophelia
• David Roberts – The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition
• François Rude – Joan of Arc
• Henry Courtney Selous – The Opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria
• Clarkson Stanfield – The Harbour of La Rochelle
• John Steell – The Duke of Wellington
• Thomas Sully -
• * Pocahontas
• Frederick August Wenderoth and Charles Christian Nahl – Miners in the Sierras
• Edwin White -
• * Pocahontas Informing John Smith of a Conspiracy of the Indians
• Franz Xaver Winterhalter – ''The Cousins''

Exhibitions

• The Society of Arts holds Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography, a photographic exhibition in London, the first of its kind.

Publications

• Edward Lear – ''Journal of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria''

Births

• April 1 – Edwin Austin Abbey, American painter and illustrator
• April 12 – Petar Ubavkić, Serbian sculptor and painter
• April 18 – George Clausen, English artist
• May 18 – Gertrude Käsebier, née Stanton, American portrait photographer
• July 27 – Edward Onslow Ford, English sculptor
• September 21 – Edmund Leighton, English historical genre painter

Deaths

• January 1 – Kapiton Pavlov, Russian portrait painter
• February 10 – Samuel Prout, English watercolour painter
• February 24 – John Frazee, first American-born sculptor to execute a bust in marble
• March 9 - Anson Dickinson, American painter of miniature portraits
• April 5 – William Cuming, Irish portrait painter
• May 30 – George Chinnery, English painter working in China
• June 4 – James Pradier, Swiss-born French sculptor in the neoclassical style
• June 11 – Karl Briullov, Russian painter who transitioned from the Russian neoclassicism to romanticism
• July 12 – Pieter Christoffel Wonder, Dutch painter, active in England
• August 4 – Alfred d'Orsay, French painter, sculptor and patron of the arts
• August 14 – Eberhard Georg Friedrich von Wächter, German painter
• September 14 – Augustus Pugin, English architect, illustrator and designer
• September 20 – William Finden, English engraver
• September 23 – John Vanderlyn, American painter in the neoclassical style
• October 17 – Henri Decaisne, Belgian historical and portrait painter
• October 26 – Johann Erdmann Hummel, German painter
• October 29 – Étienne-Jules Ramey, French sculptor and teacher
• December 18 – Horatio Greenough, American sculptor