1859 in art

Events

• March 22 – Scottish National Gallery opens to the public in Edinburgh in neoclassical premises designed by W. H. Playfair.
• April 26 – William Morris marries his model, Jane Burden. Edward Burne-Jones presents them with a self-painted wardrobe.
• May 2 – The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1859 opens in London.
• The Neue Pinakothek is completed in Munich, intended to be the first museum in Europe for the exhibition of contemporary painting.
• Frederic E. Church's The Heart of the Andes is exhibited in New York and draws 12,000 paying visitors.
• While attending the free school, the Académie Suisse, in Paris, Pissarro becomes friends with a number of younger artists also choosing to paint in a more realistic style, including Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne.
• Photography is admitted to the Paris Salon for the first time.
• The Artists Rifles set up in London as a volunteer unit of the British Army.

Works

• Peter Nicolai Arbo – Saint Olav at the Battle of Stiklestad
• Thomas Jones Barker – The Relief of Lucknow
• Albert Bierstadt – some dates approximate
• * Bernese Alps
• * Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies
• * '
• Philip Hermogenes Calderon – French Peasants Finding Their Stolen Child
• Frederic E. Church – The Heart of the Andes
• Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg – Monument to Nicholas I, the world's largest equestrian statue supported only by the hind hooves of a rearing horse
• Thomas Couture – Daydreams
• Eugène Delacroix – Ovid among the Scythians
• Robert S. Duncanson – Landscape with Rainbow
• William Dyce – Beatrice
• William Maw Egley – Omnibus Life in London
• Henri Fantin-Latour – Self-portrait
• Francesco Hayez – The Kiss, an expression of Italian Romanticism
• George Elgar Hicks – Dividend Day at the Bank of England
• James Clarke Hook
• * The Brook
• * '
• Arthur Hughes – The Long Engagement
• Charles-Auguste Lebourg – Gallic Victim
• Jules Joseph Lefebvre – King Candaules
• Édouard Manet – The Absinthe Drinker
• John Everett Millais – The Vale of Rest
• Jean-François Millet – The Angelus
• Elisabet Ney – Arthur Schopenhauer
• Henry Nelson O'Neil – Home Again
• David Roberts – Ruins of the Roman Forum
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Bocca Baciata, the first of his portraits of single female figures
• John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – Thoughts of the Past
• James McNeill Whistler – Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge
• Franz Xaver Winterhalter – ''Portrait of Prince Albert''

Births

• January 28 – Ambrosia Tønnesen, Norwegian sculptor
• May 25 – William Logsdail, English landscape, portrait, and genre painter
• June 16 – Paja Jovanović, one of the leading three Serbian Realist painters, with Đorđe Krstić and Uroš Predić
• June 17 – Walter Osborne, Irish Impressionist painter
• August 22 – John Henry Dearle, English textile designer
• October 17 – Childe Hassam, American Impressionist painter
• November 10 – Théophile Steinlen, Swiss/French painter
• November 27 – William Bliss Baker, American landscape painter
• December 2 – Georges-Pierre Seurat, French post-Impressionist painter
• December 25 – Anna Palm de Rosa, Swedish-born painter
• December 30 – Henrietta Rae, English painter

Deaths

• February 8 – William Edward West, American portrait painter
• March 3 – Cornelis Cels, Belgian painter of portraits and historical subjects
• March 24 – James Stark, English painter
• April 22 – Edward Villiers Rippingille, English painter
• May 5 – Charles Robert Leslie, English genre works painter
• May 8 – José de Madrazo y Agudo, Spanish Neoclassicist painter
• June 7 – David Cox, English landscape painter
• June 20 – Hans Michelsen, Norwegian sculptor
• August 3 – Alexey Tyranov, Russian painter
• August 27 – Catharine Hermine Kølle, Norwegian adventurer and painter
• October 21 – William Jennys, American naïve art portrait painter
• November 13 - Ernesta Legnani Bisi, Italian painter and engraver
• November 17 – James Ward, English animal painter and engraver
• December 17 – Jan Feliks Piwarski, Polish painter and professor of art date unknown – John Bacon, English sculptor