1873 in art

Events

• Early – Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon is arrested in a public urinal in London and convicted and fined for gross indecency.
• May – Vincent van Gogh is re-located to London by his employer, the art dealers Goupil & Cie.
• World exhibition in Vienna.
• Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley organize the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. for the purpose of exhibiting artworks independently.
• The collection forming the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria is moved to the Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia.
• New Accademia delle Arti del Disegno established in Florence.
• Leslie Ward, as "Spy", begins producing caricatures for the British magazine Vanity Fair.
• Michelangelo's statue of David is removed from the Piazza della Signoria in Florence to the Galleria dell'Accademia.

Works

• William-Adolphe Bouguereau – Nymphs and Satyr
• Edward Burne-Jones – Love Among the Ruins
• Alexandre Cabanel – La Comtesse de Keller
• Gustave Caillebotte – Nude woman lying on a couch
• Philip Hermogenes Calderon – Letter From Daddy
• Mary Cassatt – After the Bullfight
• Walter Crane – Shelley's Tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome
• Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville – The Last Cartridges
• Edgar Degas – A Cotton Office in New Orleans
• Jean-Léon Gérôme – Éminence Grise
• Hans Gude – Nødhavn Ved Norskekysten
• Winslow Homer – The Boat Builders
• William Holman Hunt – The Shadow of Death
• Rudolf Koller – Gotthardpost
• Ivan Kramskoi
• * Ivan Shishkin
• * Leo Tolstoy
• Édouard Manet
• * Le Bon Bock
• * The Railway
• Jan Matejko – Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God
• Pál Szinyei Merse – Picnic in May
• John Everett Millais – Portrait of Effie Millais
• Claude Monet
• * The Artist's House at Argenteuil
• * Camille Monet on a Garden Bench
• * Poppies Blooming
• Albert Joseph Moore – Follow-my-Leader
• Camille Pissarro – Self-portrait
• Ilya Repin – Barge Haulers on the Volga
• John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – The Gentle Music of a Bygone Day
• Heinrich Strack – Berlin Victory Column
• James Tissot – Too Early
• James McNeill Whistler – ''Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle''

Births

• January 28 – Charles Sims, English painter
• February 14 – Albert Guillaume, French painter and caricaturist
• March 13 – Léon Delagrange, French sculptor and aviator
• April 3 – Rista Vukanović, Serbian Impressionist painter and husband of painter Beta Vukanović
• April 4 – Élie Faure, French art historian
• April 24 – André Bauchant, French painter
• May 10 – Carl Eldh, Swedish painter and sculptor
• July 6 – Ethel Sands, American-born painter
• July 7 – Albert Moulton Foweraker, English painter
• October 12 – Nadežda Petrović, Serbian Fauvist painter
• December 5 – Julian Smith Australian surgeon and photographer was born in England date unknown – Jane Emmet de Glehn, American painter approximate date – Olowe of Ise, Yoruba wood sculptor

Deaths

• March 25 – Wilhelm Marstrand, Danish painter
• April 17 – Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy, Russian painter, engraver and silhouettist
• April 28 – Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Italian sculptor
• May 13 – Konstantin Danil, renowned Serbian painter
• May 19 – Charles Lucy, English painter
• July 8 – Franz Xaver Winterhalter, German painter
• October 2 – Cornelius Varley, English watercolor painter
• October 9 – John Evan Thomas, Welsh sculptor
• November 25 – Hans Harder, Danish painter and drawing master
• November 27 – Edmund Thomas Parris, English historical, portrait, subject, and panorama painter, book illustrator, designer and art restorer
• December 9 – William Bent Berczy, painter and political figure in Upper Canada date unknown
• * Nikola Aleksić, Serbian portraitist in both the Biedermeier and Nazarene movement
• * Thomas Frank Heaphy, English miniature painter
• * Ignatius Josephus van Regemorter, Flemish historical, landscape, and genre painter and engraver