Master ES becomes the first artist to produce engravings

Rembrandt creates an etching so desirable that it becomes known as the Hundred Guilder Print

The pleasure districts of Edo and Kyoto provide the delights of ukiyo-e, the 'floating world'

A French artist, Jean Baptiste le Prince, discovers the aquatint technique in printmaking

Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro is a master of colour woodcuts, often depicting the courtesan district of Edo

Austrian author Alois Senefelder, experimenting with grease and water on stone, discovers the principles of lithography

The elderly Francisco de Goya becomes the first great artist to attempt lithography

Hokusai begins to publish his famous colour-printed views of Mount Fuji

Fox Talbot exposes the first photographic negatives, among them a view looking out through an oriel window in Lacock Abbey

John James Audubon completes publication of the 435 plates forming his 4-volume Birds of America

Fox Talbot patents the 'calotype', introducing the negative-positive process that becomes standard in photography

English caricaturist George Cruikshank publishes The Drunkard's Children in support of the developing Temperance movement

Scottish painter David Roberts completes publication of his 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia

English photographer Frederick Scott Archer publishes the details of his collodion process, a marked improvement on the earlier calotype negative

Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

English artist William Simpson sends sketches from the Crimea which achieve rapid circulation in Britain as tinted lithographs

The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

Mathew Brady sends teams ot photographers to the various battle fronts to ensure a thorough photographic record of the American Civil War

48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

English-born US photographer Eadweard Muybridge publishes closely linked photographs revealing how a horse goes through its paces

English physicist Joseph Swan receives a patent for bromide paper, which becomes the standard material for printing photographs

Eadweard Muybridge projects slow-motion images of a trotting horse as a demonstration at London's Royal Institution

Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

In How the Other Half Lives David Riis alerts middle-class New Yorkers to the appalling slum conditions in lower Manhattan

The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has his first exhibition, in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York