WebMuseum, Famous Paintings
 

Discovery of ultraviolet rays  Volta invents voltaic pile	1800	David, Madame Recamier  Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans
	1801
Napoleon made Consul for life	1802	Chateaubriand, Génie due Christianisme
	1803
Napoleon crowned Emperor  Lewis and Clark expedition	1804	Schiller, William Tell
Battle of Trafalgar	1805	Ludwig Arnim and Clemes Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn
Formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire  Lewis and Clark reach Pacific	1806
Fulton builds the first commercial steamboat  Lond streets lighted by gas	1807	Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit  Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
	1808	Goethe, Faust, Part I
	1809
	1810	Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake
	1811	Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit
Napoleon retreats from Moscow	1812	Goerge Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder and Hausmärchen
Napoleon abdicates	1813	Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice
Napoleon to Elba  Congress of Vienna	1814	Scott, Waverly  Francisco Goya, King Ferdinand VII
Battle of Waterloo  The Holy Alliance	1815	Goya, Witch's Sabbath
	1816	Percy Shelley, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude
	1817	David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation  John Keats, Endymion  Byron, Manfred
	1818
First steamship crosses Atlantic  Florida purchased from Spain	1819	Scott, Ivanhoe
	1820-1829	Beethoven's Ninth Symphony  Niépce, first positive-image photographs (France)  Audubon, Birds of America (USA)
	1820	Shelley, Prometheus Unbound  Blake, Jerusalem  Alphone Lamartine Méditations Poétiques
Faraday's electric motor and generator	1821	John Constable, The Hay Wain
	1822
Monroe doctrine	1823
Charles X of France crowned	1824
Erie Canal opened  Ludwig I of Bavaria crowned	1825	Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi  Alexander Pushkin, Boris Gudunov
	1826	James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Mormon church founded	1827	Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder
	1828	First performance of Goethe's Faust
Independence of Greece	1829	Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie Humaine  Victor Hugo, Les Orientales  James Mill, Analysis of the Mind
	1830-1839	Hokusai, Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Japan)  Cole, The Oxbow (USA)  Houses of Parliament Redesigned (England)
First railroad, Liverpool to Manchester  July Revolution in France	1830	Lamartine, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses  Hugo, Hernani  Stenndhal, Le Rouge et le Noir
William Lloyd Garrison found the Liberator  Beginning of anti-slavery movement	1831	Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris
	1832
Slavery outlawed in British Empire	1833	Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
McCormick patents mechanical reaper	1834	Edward Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii
	1835
Independence of Texas	1836	Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers  Sir Charles Barry designs Houses of Parliament, London
Queen Victoria crowned  Mount Holyoke College founded	1837	Carlisle, The French Revolution
Daguerre takes first photographs	1838	Ferdinand Delacroix, The Capture of Constantinople
	1839	Joseph Turner, The fighting Temeraire  Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque  Stendahl, The Charterhouse of Parms
Revolt in Paris establishes French Second Republic	1840-1849	Talbot publishes first book illustrated with photographs (England)  Labrouste, Biblioth&egrav;que Sainte-Genevi&egrav;ve (France)  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood established in England  Courbet, A Burial ay Ornans
First incandescent electric bulb	1840
	1841	Punch founded
	1842
	1843	Sören Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
First telegraph message transmitted	1844	Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers
	1845	Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
First use of ether as an anesthetic  Howe's sewing machine patented  Smithsonian Institution founded	1846
	1847
Potato famine in Ireland  Gold rush in California  First Women's Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, NY)  Revolutionary uprisings in Europe	1848	Thomas Macaulay, History of England  William Thackeray, Vanity Fair  Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias,  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (Germany)
	1849	Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breaker  Dickens, David Copperfield
South African Republic established	1850-1859	Paxton, Crystal Palace (England)  Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (England)
	1850	Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  Dante Rossetti, The Annunciation  Theodor Storm, Immensee  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
First submarine telegraph cable	1851	Melville, Moby Dick  Millet, The Gleaners (France)
Second Empire under Napoleon III	1852	Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (USA)
Crimean War  Commodore Perry opens Japan to the West  first rail connection New York-Chicago	1853
	1854	Thoreau, Walden (USA)
Charge of the Light Brigade	1855	Whitman, Leaves of Grass
	1856
Dred Scott decision	1857	Flaubert, Madame Bovary (France)  Currier and Ives publish prints  Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
Covent Garden opera house opens	1858
Darwin, Origin of Species (England)  John Brown raids Harper's Ferry	1859	Millet, The Angelus  Tennyson, Idylls of the King
Dominion of Canada formed  Meiji Restoration of emperor (Japan)  Revolution in Spain	1860-1869	Hugo, Les Misérables (France)  Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympia (France)  Brooklyn Bridge begun (USA)
	1860
Serfs emancipated in Russia  Unification of Italy  Civil War in America (till 1865)	1861	George Elliott, Silas Marner
Bismark chancellor of Prussia	1862	Turgenev, Fathers and Sons  Daumier, Third Class Carriage
Gettysburg Address  Emancipation Proclamation	1863	Manet, Olympia
First International founded by Karl Marx  First qascent of the Matterhorn  First successful transatlantic cable	1864	Carroll, Alice in Wonderland  Tolstoy, War and Peace (Russia)
Lincoln assassinated  Thirteen Amendment ratified, outlawing slavery	1865
Christian Science founded by Mary Baker Eddy	1866	Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (Russia)
Purchase of Alaska  Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary (til 1916)	1867	Ibsen, Peer Gynt  Marx, Das Kapitol
	1868	Browning, The Ring and the Book  Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Suez Canal opened  First American transcontinental railroad	1869	Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
	1870-1879	First Impressionistart exhibition (France)  Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 (Russia)  Renoir, Moulin de la Galette (France) William Morris  promotes Arts and Crafts Movement (Englamd) Muybridge, motion photography (USA)
Schliemann excavates the site of Troy  Rome becomes the capital of Italy  Franco-Prussian War  Vatican Council proclaims papal infallibility	1870
Bismark chancellor of Germany  Paris Commune  Third Republic in France	1871	Emerson, Essays  Darwin, Descent of Man
	1872	Eliot, Middlemarch  Whistler, Portrait of Miss Alexander  Daudet, Tartarin de Tarascon  Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
	1873	Degas, Place de la Concorde
	1874
	1875	Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health  Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Telephone invented by Bell	1876	Mallarmé, L'Après-midi d'un Faune  Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer  Renoir, Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette
Edison invents the phonograph	1877	Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare
	1878
Edison invents an improved incandescent electric light	1879	George, Progress and Poverty  Ibsen, The Doll's House  Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Major European colonization of Africa begins  Hertz discovers and produces radio waves (Germany)  Eastman's box camera (USA)  Steel first used in building construction (USA)	1880-1890	Neo-Impressionists emerge (France)  Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (France)  Art Nouveau emerges (France)  Van Gogh, The Starry Night (France)
Irish insurrection  Pavlov's experiments on conditioned reflexes	1880	Zola, Nana
Tsar Alexander Ii assassinated  President Garfield shot  Panama Canal built	1881	Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party  James, Portrait of a Lady
Koch discovers tuberculosis germs  Triple Alliance	1882	Manet, The Bar at the Folies Bergères
Daimler patents automobile motor	1883	Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarasthustra  Stevenson, Treasure Island
Pasteur innoculates against rabies  Mean solar day adopted as unit of universal time	1884	Rodin, The Burghers of Calais (France)  Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on Grande Jatte  Twain, Huckleberry Finn
First American electric street railway  Brooklyn Bridge built	1885	Richardson designs Marshall Field warehouse  Guy de Maupassant, Contes et Nouvelles  Cézanne, Mont St. Victoire  Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
American Federation of Labor organized  Statue of Liberty unveiled in New York Harbor	1886	Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böaut;se  Loti, Pêcheur d'Islande  Rousseau, Un Soir de carnaval
	1887	Strindberg, Der Vater
Kaiser Wilhelm II crowned (till 1918)	1888	Van Gogh, The Sunflowers
Paris World's Fair opened  Brazil expels emperor, becomes republic	1889	Eiffel Tower completed  Adams, History of theUnited States  Rodin, The Thinker
Sino-Japanese War  X rays discovered (Germany)  Olympic Games reestablished (Greece)   Aspirin is invented	1890-1899	James, The Principles of Psychology (USA)  Riis, How the Other Half Lives (USA)  Roman School of classicists (France)  Sullivan, Wainwright Building (USA)  McKim, Mead, and White, Boston Public Library  Horta, Tassel House (Belgium)  Antiacademic Secession movement begins in France  Hunt, Biltmore Estate (USA)  World of Art group forms in St. Petersburg (Russia)  Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Austria) and advent of psychoanalysis
	1890	Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
	1891	Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes  Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial
	1892	Cézanne, The Card Players  Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande  Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge
	1893	Crane, The Red Badge of Courage  Wilde, Salome  Sullivan, Transportation Building at World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago
Nicholas II crowned; last Czar of Russia  Dreyfus Affair (till 1905)	1894	Kipling, Jungle Book  Shaw, Candida
Roentgen discovers X-rays	1895	Homer, Northeaster
	1896	Gaughin, Materity  Housman, A Shropshire Lad
	1897
Spanish-American War	1898	Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
	1899
	1900-1909	Stieglitz organizes Photo-Secession group, later known as 291 (USA)  Fauves named (France)  Die Br&uumlaut;cke forms (Germany)  Golden Fleece group forms in Moscow (Russia)  Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (France)  Braque, Houses at L'Estaque inspires term Cubism (France)  Ashcan School forms (USA)  Braque and Picasso develop Analytic Cubism (France) Futurism emerges (Italy)
Boxer Rebellion  Zeppelin constructs first dirigible  Freud,The Interpretatio of Dreams  Hopkins, first studies of vitamins	1900  R	Conrad, Lord Jim  Sargent, The Windham Sisters  Tolstoy, Resurrection
Edward VII King of England (till 1910)  Marconi transmits wireless telegraph signals across the Atlantic  Planck developes quantum theory	1901	Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra  Mann, Buddenbrooks
Discovery of radium by Albert & Marie Curie	1902	Gorky, Tales  Monet, Waterloo Bridge
Wright brothers, first successful powered airplane flight  Pope Pius X, Encyclical, Moto proprio  Twsett, studies in absorption chromatography	1903	Shaw, Man and Superman
Russo-Japanese War	1904	Chekov, The Cherry Orchard  Barrie, Peter Pan  Rolland, Jean Christophe
Norway separates from Sweden  First Russian Revolution  Einstein, special relativity theory  Wilstaetter, first chemical investigations in photosynthesis	1905
San Francisco eathquake and fire	1906	Derain, London Bridge
Second Hague Conference  Triple Entente	1907	Synge, The Playboy of the Western World  James,Pragmatism  Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Model "T" Ford produced	1908	Rilke, Neue Gedichte
Peary reaches North Pole	1909	Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, Chicago  Monár,Liliom
Union of South Africa Forms  Worldwide influenza epidemic kills 20 million people  League of Nations	1910-1919	Kandinsky organizes Der Blaue Reiter (Germany)  Braque and Picasso evolve Synthetic Cubism (France)  Cubo-Futurism emerges (Russia)  Gilbert, Woolworth Building (USA)  Armory Show launches modernism in USA  Sant'Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (Italy)  Malevich, Suprematist Painting (Russia)  Dada movement begins in Switzerland  De Stijl emerges in the Netherlands  Purism emerges (France)  Gropius establishes Bauhaus (Germany)
Discovery of protons and electrons  George V King of England (till 1936)	1910	Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica  Masefield,The Tragedy of Pompey the Great
Amundsen reaches South Pole	1911	Wharton, Ethan Frome  de Chirico, La Nostalgie de l'infini
Titanic Disaster  Balkan wars	1912	Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase  Kandinsky, Improvisation
	1913	Lawrence, Sons and Lovers  Mann, Death in Venice  Sloane, Women Drying their Hair  Braque, Musical Forms  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
First World War (till 1918)  Panama Canal opened	1914  R R	Frost, North of Boston  Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems  Griffith, The Birth of a Nation  de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
Bragg, X-Rays and Crystal Structure  Morgan, Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (theory of the gene)	1915	Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Einstein, general relativity theory  Bolshevik revolution in Russia  Battle of Verdun	1916	Wright, Imperial Hotel in Tokyo
US enters World War I	1917  R	Rouault, Three Clowns  Yeats, Wild Swans at Coole
	1918	Cather, My Antonia  Spengler, Decline of the West
	1919
Census shows more people living in urban than rural United States  Women citizens granted the right to vote in the United States  John Scopes convicted of teaching evolution in public school (USA)  Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by 62 nations, attempts to end war	1920-1929	Harlem Renaissance (USA)  Constructivist movement (Russia)  Leger, Three Women (France)  Le Corbusier, design for a Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants (France)  Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism" (France)  Lang, film, Metropolis (Germany)  Rietveld, Schr&oumlaut;der House (Netherlands  Hitler, Mein Kampf (Germany)  Morgan, San Simeon estate (USA)  American Scene Painting emerges  Eisenstein, film, October (Russia)  Mead, book, Coming of Age in Samoa (USA)  Rivera, murals for Mexico City Ministry of Education  Woolf, essay, A Room of One's Own (England)  The Museum of Modern Art founded (USA)
	1920  R
	1921	Picasso,Three Musicians  Mondriaan, Painting No. 1  Chaplin, The Kid
Fascist revolution in Italy  Discovery of insulin	1922	Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga  Eliot, The Waste Land (England)  Joyce, Ulysses (Ireland)  Rilke, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus
Hitler, Ludendorff Putsch in Munich	1923	Klee, At the Mountain of the Bull
Stalin becomes dictator in Russia	1924	Shaw, Saint Joan  Mann, The Magic Mountain  Kafka, The Trial
Keilin, discovery of cytochromes and beginning of molecular biology	1925	Dreiser, An American Tragedy  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
	1926	Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (USA)  First all-sound films
Lindberg makes first solo trans-Atlantic flight (USA)  First television transmission  Heisenberg and others propound "uncertainty principle" in quantum physics	1927	Epstein, Madonna and child  Woolf, To the Lighthouse  O'Neill, Strange Interlude
Dirigible Graf Zeppelin circles globe (Germany)  First radio broadcast of New York Philharmonic	1928	Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover  Huxley, Point Counter Point  Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body
New York stock marked crash  beginning of world-wide depression	1929	van der Rohe, German pavilion  Giraudoux, Amphitryon 38  Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel  Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Socialist Realism in art instituted by Stalin (Russia)  Hitler takes dictatorial power in Germany  Roosevelt establishes Federal Arts Project (USA)  Spanish Civil War  Carlson invents xerography (USA)  Nazis launch anti-Jewish campaign throughout Germany	1930-1939	Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (Netherlands)  Regionalist painters emerge (USA)  Huxley, novel, Brave New World (England)  Malraux, novel, Man's Fate  Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (USA)  Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California photographed for Farm Securities Administration (USA)  Mitchell, novel, Gone with the Wind (USA)  American Abstract Artists group forms  Renoir, film, The Grand Illusion (France)  Miller, novel, Tropic of Capricorn (USA)  Steinbeck, novel, Grapes of Wrath (USA)  Kahlo, Two Fridas (Mexico)  Krasner, Red, White, Blue, Yelllow, Black (USA)
	1930	Mondriaan, Fox Trot  Hopper, Early Sunday Morning  Grant Wood, American Gothic  Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses  Hart Crane, The Bridge
Japan invades Manchuria	1931	O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
Discovery of the neutron	1932	Stein, Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein
F. D. Roosevelt, President of US  Hitler, Chancellor of Germany	1933	Miró, Composition  Toynbee, A Study of History  Malraux, La Condition humaine
Adrian, studies in the electric nature of nerve impulses  Joliot, discovery of induced radioactivity	1934	Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
Italy invades Ethiopia	1935	Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral  Orozco, Man in Four Aspects
Spanish Civil War	1936	Dos Passos, U.S.A.
Japan invades China  Andersson, discovery of positive electrons and mesons  Krebs, metabolic pathways  Hill, demonstration of chloroplast reaction in plants	1937	Picasso, Guernica  Marquand, The Late George Apley
Bethe, Energy Production in Stars  Discovery of nuclear fission  Development of penicillin	1938	Dufy, Regatta
World War II (till 1945)	1939	Joyce, Finnegans Wake  Forester, Captain Horatio Hornblower  Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
First radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera  Roosevelt elected to third term  First commercial electron microscope  Microwave radar	1940	Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
U.S. enters war  Atlantic Charter	1941
United Nations Alliance	1942
	1943	Chagall, Crucifixion
Roosevelt elected to fourth term  Allied armies invade Germany	1944
Surrender of Germany  Atomic bomb used against Japan  New York chosen as seat of United Nations  Radio astronomy  Jet planes and rockets	1945
First Assembly of United Nations  Nuremberg trials	1946	Le Corbusier, Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles  Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances
Marshall Plan  Independence of India  Perutz, X-ray studies on crystalline proteins	1947	Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire
	1948
North Atlantic Defense Pact  Communist government in China	1949	Orwell, 1984  Miller, Death of a Salesman
Korean War  Hydrogen bomb	1950	Eliot, The Coctail Party
NATO formed from North Atlantic Pact	1951	Lipchitz, Birth of Venus
	1952	Calder, Giraffe  Camus, L'Homme revolté  Eliot, Complete Plays and Poems
Malenkov succeeds Stalin in Russia  Watson-Crick model of DNA molecule	1953	Churchill, History of the Second World War  Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes, molecular amplification by stimulated emission of radiation  U. S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation	1954	e. e. cummings, Poems, 1923-1954  Thomas, Under Milk Wood
E.R. Andrew, Nuclear Magnetic Renonance	1955	Auden, The Shield of Achilles
Revolt in Hungary	1956
First Sputnik launched  International Geophysical Year begins  T.D. Lee and C.N.Yang awarded Nobel Prize for discovery of principle of non-conservation of parity	1957
Explorer I (U.S. satellite)  Voyage of the Nautilus  Khrushchev becomes Premier of U.S.S.R.	1958
First moon rockets  Studies in the structure of viruses	1959
25 artificial satellites now in orbit  Pioneer V launched  First working laser	1960
Peace Corps established  Berlin Wall erected  First manned space flights	1961	Oldenburg, "Store"  "Art of Assemblage" show at Museum of Modern Art  David Smith, "Cubi" sculptures
Vatican Council II convenes  Cuban missile crisis	1962	Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
President Kennedy assassinated  Increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam	1963	Carson, Silent Spring
Kosygin becomes Premier of U.S.S.R.	1964
Gemini space vehicles  Civil Rights march in Alabama	1965	Autobiography of Malcolm X  Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat (Marat-Sade)  Hofmann paints Renate series
	1966	Pinter, The Homecoming
Israeli-Arab Six-Day War  Development of astrophysics  Burbidge, Quasi-Stellar Objects ("quasars")  Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin  Length of one second of time now determinable within limit of error of 1-2 parts in 1010	1967
Soviet invasion of Czechosolvakia  Student uprisings in France  Massive anti-war protests in U.S.A.  Assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert f. Kennedy	1968
First men on the moon	1969
	1970	Tofler, Future Shock  Reich, The Greening of America
Indo-Pakistani war  Independence of Bangladesh	1971
Watergate  Black September terrorist killings at Munich Olympics  Pioneer 10 launched	1972
End of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam	1973	Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Hearst kidnapping  U.S.S.R. deports Solzhenitsyn  President Nixon resigns	1974	Opening of Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
War in Cambodia ends  International Women's Year  Suez Canal reopens	1975
U.S. Bicentennial celebrations  Earthquake in Guatemala kills an estimated 25,000 people  Death of Mao Tse Tsung  Carter elected president	1976	Centenary of Bayreuth Festival
Detection of rings around the planet Uranus  Blackouts in New York City  Attrocities in Uganda under Amin regime  Orient Express makes last run between Paris and Istanbul  Panama Canal Treaty signed	1977
First test-tube baby  Discovery of Pluto's moon "Charon"  Pope John Paul II elected	1978	Opening of East Wing of National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Khomeini leads revolution in Iran	1979

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