1857 in art

Events

• May 4 – The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857 opens at the National Gallery in London
• June 15 – The Salon of 1857 opens in Paris
• June 22 – The South Kensington Museum, predecessor of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is opened by Queen Victoria in London.
• The Sheepshanks Gift takes place. The art collector John Sheepshanks donates a large number of paintings to the nation, forming the basis of the collection of the new Victoria and Albert Museum
• Lewis Carroll meets John Ruskin and begins to associate with the Pre-Raphaelites. In the same year, Ruskin publishes his Political Economy of Art.
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Pre-Raphaelite friends begin painting the Oxford Union murals; Jane Burden first models for them.

Exhibitions

• May 5–October 17 – The Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition is held in Manchester, one of the largest such displays of all time. Photographs are admitted.

Works

• Jerry Barrett – Florence Nightingale Receiving the Wounded at Scutari
• Margaret Sarah Carpenter – Portrait of John Gibson
• Edward William Cooke – Morning After a Heavy Gale
• Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
• * Le concert champêtre
• * The Destruction of Sodom
• Gustave Courbet – Louis Guéymard as Robert le Diable
• Thomas Couture
• * The Supper after the Masked Ball
• * The Duel after the Masked Ball
• Jean-Léon Gérôme –
• * The Duel After the Masquerade
• * Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert
• Francis Grant – Portrait of Daisy Grant
• Hiroshige – Prints from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo including Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake
• Robert Howlett – Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern
• Arthur Hughes – The Mother's Grave
• Gerolamo Induno – The Battle of the Chernaya
• Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov – The Appearance of Christ Before the People
• Rudolf Koller – Cow in a Vegetable Garden
• Edwin Landseer – Uncle Tom
• Benjamin Williams Leader – A Quiet Pool in Glenfalloch
• John Frederick Lewis – The Coffee Bearer
• Octave Penguilly L'Haridon – The Combat of the Thirty
• Daniel Maclise – Peter the Great at Deptford Dockyard
• John Everett Millais – A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford
• Jean-François Millet
• * The Angelus
• * The Gleaners
• Philip Richard Morris –
• Emily Mary Osborn – Nameless and Friendless
• O. G. Rejlander – The Two Ways of Life
• Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel – Goethe–Schiller Monument
• David Roberts – The Piazza Navona at Rome
• Raden Saleh – The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro
• Jozef Van Lerius – Portrait of Henriette Mayer van den Bergh
• Horace Vernet
• * Portrait of Marshal Canrobert
• * Portrait of Pierre Bosquet
• Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller – Corpus Christi Morning
• Henry Wallis – The Stonebreaker
• August Wredow – ''Iris Takes the Fallen Hero to Olympus''

Births

• February 12 – Eugène Atget, French photographer
• May 17 – Mary Devens, American pictorial photographer
• July 30 – Lucy Bacon, American Impressionist painter
• July 31 – Adolphe Willette, French illustrator
• September 10 – Adolphe Demange, French portrait painter
• September 22 – Étienne Terrus, French painter
• October 23 – Juan Luna, Filipino painter
• November 18 – Stanhope Forbes, British painter of the Newlyn school
• November 21 – Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, Portuguese painter
• December 7 – Uroš Predić, one of the top three Serbian Realist painters, along with Paja Jovanović and Đorđe Krstić
• December 8 – Anna Bilińska, Polish painter
• December 22 – W. W. Quatremain, English landscape painter
• December 23 – Georges Picard, French decorative artist and illustrator date unknown – Esther Kenworthy Waterhouse, English flower painter

Deaths

• January 30 – Agostino Aglio, Italian painter, decorator, and engraver
• March 18 – Nathan Cooper Branwhite, English miniature portrait painter, watercolourist and engraver
• May 1 – Frederick Scott Archer, English sculptor and photographic pioneer
• May 16 – Vasily Tropinin, Russian painter
• June 11 – Moritz Retzsch, German painter and etcher
• October 10 – Thomas Crawford, American sculptor
• October 14 – Johan Christian Dahl, Norwegian landscape painter
• October 27 – John Blennerhassett Martin, American painter, engraver and lithographer
• November 14 – Cornelis Kruseman, Dutch painter
• December 3 – Christian Daniel Rauch, German sculptor
• December 16 – William Havell, English landscape painter, part of the Havell family
• December 23 – Achille Devéria, French portrait painter and lithographer
• date unknown
• * Nicholas Joseph Crowley, Irish portrait painter
• * Luigi Rossini, Italian artist known for his etchings of ancient Roman architecture