Catherine the Great founds the Hermitage as a court museum attached to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg

The Royal Academy is established in London, with Joshua Reynolds as its first president

Thomas Gainsborough moves from Bath to set up a studio in London

John Singleton Copley, already established as America's greatest portrait painter, moves to London

In Brook Watson and the Shark John Singleton Copley creates the most intensely dramatic of his modern history paintings

15-year-old Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun earns enough from painting portraits to support the rest of her family

Jacques-Louis David, establishing a reputation with his severe classical paintings, is elected to the French academy

Francisco de Goya is appointed painter to the king of Spain, Charles III

The painter Jacques-Louis David sketches the events in the Versailles tennis court

Francisco de Goya is appointed court painter to the new Spanish king, Charles IV

English painter J.M.W. Turner is only 15 when a painting of his, a watercolour, is first exhibited at the Royal Academy

Scottish painter Henry Raeburn depicts the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch

After four years in Copenhagen, German artist Caspar David Friedrich makes his life-long home in Dresden

Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (in 1800) is the first of several paintings by Jacques-Louis David celebrating the future emperor

French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres moves to Rome and lives there for 18 years

An uprising in Madrid, brutally put down by the French, is vividly depicted by the Spanish painter Goya

Baroness Howe demolishes Pope's Villa, earning herself the sobriquet Queen of the Goths, and builds a new house next door. The demolition is recorded by J M W Turner in his painting 'Pope's Villa at Twickenham'.

Jacques-Louis David, unmistakably identified as Napoleon's painter, is banished from France after the fall of the emperor and moves to Brussels

British officers, hoping to shoot a tiger, come across the forgotten Buddhist caves of Ajanta

J.M.W. Turner makes the first of several visits to Venice, and discovers a rich seam of inspiration

French painter Théodore Géricault begins a two-year visit to Britain

English painter John Constable acquires a house in Hampstead, a region of London that features frequently in his work

With Kaaterskill Falls 26-year-old Thomas Cole pioneers a heroic tradition in US landscape painting

English artist Samuel Palmer moves to Shoreham, in Kent, for the most inspired years of his career

French painter Eugène Delacroix begins a five-month visit to north Africa, with profound effects on his future art