The American portrait-painter John Singer Sargent makes London his home and begins an immensely successful career

Leaving his family in Copenhagen, French artist Paul Gauguin returns to Paris to paint full-time

French painter Georges Seurat develops the dotted style of impressionism that becomes known as Pointillism

Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh moves from Antwerp to Paris

Vincent van Gogh invites Paul Gauguin to come and paint with him at Arles, in the south of France

Vincent van Gogh enters a psychiatric asylum in St Rémy as a voluntary patient

French artist Paul Gauguin travels to Tahiti and stays in the Pacific islands for most of the rest of his life

Gwen John persuades a reluctant father to allow her to follow her younger brother to the Slade School of Art in London

The Welsh painter Augustus John becomes Britain's most famous bohemian

A change of palette by Pablo Picasso takes him into what becomes known as his Blue Period

Augustus John meets his favourite subject Dorothy McNeill, to whom he gives the Gypsy name Dorelia

Henri Matisse completes his painting Luxe, Calme et Volupté

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other Dresden students form the Expressionist group Die Brücke

Pablo Picasso's palette becomes warmer as Blue evolves into Rose

Henri Matisse, in the south of France, paints The Open Window, Collioure, the first of his many works on this theme

Matisse, Derain and others, exhibiting in Paris their shockingly colourful new works, are dubbed fauves ("wild beasts") by a critic

Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein prefigures cubism in its mask-like treatment of her face

A large retrospective exhibition in Paris gives Paul Gauguin a growing posthumous reputation

Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a violent transition into cubism, is a turning point in western art

Without financial support from his mother, Hitler ekes out a meagre living painting postcards and advertisements

Georges Braque's Houses at L'Estaque introduces analytic Cubism

The French critic Louis Vauxcelles describes Braque's latest landscapes as being composed of cubes, resulting in the term cubism

The critic Roger Fry presents in London's Grafton Galleries an influential exhibition of Post-Impressionist art

Henri Matisse completes two large paintings, La Danse and La Musique, for the staircase of Sergei Shchukin's house in Moscow

Wassily Kandinsky's paintings entitled Compositions are the first examples of purely abstract art