1859 in art

Events from the year 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.
 * 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.
 * This year's Paris Salon admits photographs.
 * 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
 * The Wolf River, Kansas
 * 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 (Saint Petersburg), 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 (first version)
 * Robert S. Duncanson – Landscape with Rainbow
 * William Dyce – Beatrice (Lady with a Coronet of Jasmine)
 * William Maw Egley – Omnibus Life in London
 * Henri Fantin-Latour – Self-portrait
 * Francesco Hayez – The Kiss, an expression of Italian Romanticism
 * James Clarke Hook
 * The Brook
 * Luff, Boy!
 * Arthur Hughes – The Long Engagement
 * Charles-Auguste Lebourg – Gallic Victim (marble)
 * Édouard Manet – The Absinthe Drinker (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)
 * John Everett Millais – The Vale of Rest
 * Jean-François Millet – The Angelus (completed version) (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
 * Elisabet Ney – Arthur Schopenhauer (sculpture)
 * Henry Nelson O'Neil – Home Again
 * Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Bocca Baciata, the first of his portraits of single female figures (Fanny Cornforth)
 * John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – Thoughts of the Past
 * James McNeill Whistler – Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge

Births

 * January 28 – Ambrosia Tønnesen, Norwegian sculptor (died 1948)
 * May 25 – William Logsdail, English landscape, portrait, and genre painter (died 1944)
 * June 16 – Paja Jovanović, one of the leading three Serbian Realist painters, with Đorđe Krstić and Uroš Predić (died 1957)
 * June 17 – Walter Osborne, Irish Impressionist painter (died 1903)
 * August 22 – John Henry Dearle, English textile designer (died 1932)
 * October 17 – Childe Hassam, American Impressionist painter (died 1935)
 * November 10 – Théophile Steinlen, Swiss/French painter (died 1923)
 * November 27 – William Bliss Baker, American landscape painter (died 1886)
 * December 2 – Georges-Pierre Seurat, French post-Impressionist painter (died 1891)
 * December 25 – Anna Palm de Rosa, Swedish-born painter (died 1924)
 * December 30 – Henrietta Rae, English painter (died 1928)

Deaths

 * February 8 – William Edward West, American portrait painter (born 1788)
 * March 3 – Cornelis Cels, Belgian painter of portraits and historical subjects (born 1778)
 * March 24 – James Stark, English painter (born 1794)
 * April 22 – Edward Villiers Rippingille, English painter (born c.1790)
 * May 5 – Charles Robert Leslie, English genre works painter (born 1794)
 * May 8 – José de Madrazo y Agudo, Spanish Neoclassicist painter (born 1781)
 * June 7 – David Cox, English landscape painter (born 1783)
 * June 20 – Hans Michelsen, Norwegian sculptor (born 1789)
 * August 3 – Alexey Tyranov, Russian painter (born 1801)
 * August 27 – Catharine Hermine Kølle, Norwegian adventurer and painter (born 1788)
 * October 21 – William Jennys, American naïve art portrait painter (born 1774)
 * November 13 - Ernesta Legnani Bisi, Italian painter and engraver (born 1788)
 * November 17 – James Ward, English animal painter and engraver (born 1769)
 * December 17 – Jan Feliks Piwarski, Polish painter and professor of art (born 1794)
 * date unknown – John Bacon, English sculptor (born 1777)