1859 - Art

Art

Painting: The Absinth Drinker by French painter Edouard Manet, 27; The Angelus by Jean-François Millet; All Souls Day by William Adolphe Bouguereau; Le Bain Turc by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, now 79; Battle of Solferino by Ernest Meissonier; At the Piano by Lowell, Massachusetts-born painter-etcher James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 25, who lived in Russia during his teens while his father directed construction of a railroad for Czar Nicholas I, was forced to leave West Point at age 19 for failing chemistry, has lived abroad since age 21, and now settles at London; Heart of the Andes by Frederick Edwin Church; Bernese Alps by German painter Albert Bierstadt, 29.

Sculpture: Checkers up at the Farm by Massachusetts machinist-sculptor John Rogers, 29, who has been asked to provide a piece for a local charity fair. He goes to New York later in the year and creates a sensation with his piece The Slave Auction, and when dealers tell him that it cannot be offered for sale lest it offend Southern customers, Rogers sells copies of it door to door along with other works.

Florence's Bargello opens as a museum of medieval and Renaissance sculpture.