20-year-old English artist Edward Lear publishes Family of the Psittacidae, a collection of his paintings of parrots

A school of landscape painting emerges in New York, with emphasis on the scenery of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains

English artist Edward Lear begins a series of travels, sketching around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East

J.M.W. Turner paints an icon of British art, The Fighting Téméraire

The French painter Gustave Courbet moves from his native town of Ornans to Paris

Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons

English art students Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicts his sister Christina in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin

Queen Victoria knights her favourite painter of animals, Edwin Landseer

English cartoonist John Tenniel begins a 50-year career drawing for the satirical magazine Punch

Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat combines realism and symbolism in an extreme example of Pre-Raphaelite characteristics

John Everett Millais marries Effie Gray, previously the wife of John Ruskin

US artist James McNeill Whistler settles in London, which he makes his home for the rest of his life

US painter Winslow Homer makes his name with the exhibition of a Civil War subject, Prisoners from the Front

Young French artists Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint together in the open air at La Grenouillère, developing the Impressionist style

French part-time painter Henri Rousseau becomes known as Douanier ('customs officer') Rousseau because of his paid employment

French artist Claude Monet, fleeing from the Franco-Prussian War, arrives in London

Whistler paints his mother and calls the picture Arrangement in Grey and Black

Whistler begins to paint his Nocturnes, a revolutionary series of night-time images on the river Thames

French painter Edgar Degas finds inspiration in the onstage and backstage world of ballet dancers

A group of French artists, including Renoir, Monet and Degas, exhibit their work independently in the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar

French critic Louis Leroy uses the term 'impressionism' to ridicule Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and unwittingly names a movement

US artist Thomas Eakins' depiction of the gruesome aspect of surgery, in his portrait of Dr Gross, offends many viewers

The young daughter of an amateur archaeologist discovers the first known example of prehistoric art, in a cave at Altamira in Spain

French artist Claude Monet moves to Giverny, where he creates and paints a famous lily pond