1874 in art

Events

• February–March – A memorial exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Viktor Hartmann is held at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and inspires his friend Modest Mussorgsky to compose the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.
• April 15 – First Impressionist exhibition opens in a private studio (belonging to Nadar) outside the official Paris Salon; Louis Leroy in the French satirical newspaper Le Charivari coins the term "impressionism".
• Goya's Black Paintings are transferred to canvas.
• Claude Monet begins painting his Snow at Argenteuil series.
• Berthe Morisot marries Eugene, brother of Édouard Manet.
• Helen Paterson, later know as Helen Allingham, marries William Allingham.

Works

Renoir – La loge

• Peter Nicolai Arbo
  • Dagr
  • Self-portrait
• Thomas Jones Barker – Balaklava – One of the Six Hundred
• Caroline Shawk Brooks – Dreaming Iolanthe (butter sculpture; first version)
• Ford Madox Brown – Cromwell on his Farm
• Edward Burne-Jones – The Beguiling of Merlin
• Louis Buvelot – Macedon Ranges
• Edgar Degas – The Dancing Lesson
• Pere Borrell del Caso – Escaping Criticism
• Thomas Eakins – Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand
• Henri Fantin-Latour – Still Life with Pansies (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
• Luke Fildes – Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward
• Emmanuel Frémiet – Joan of Arc (formerly in the Place des Pyramides, Paris)
• Walter Greaves – Old Battersea Bridge
• Armand Guillaumin – La Seine (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Winslow Homer – Farmer with a Pitch Fork
• Vilhelm Kyhn – Sildig Sommeraften ved Himmelbjærget ("Late Summer Evening near Himmelbjerget")
• Édouard Manet – Boating (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Antonin Mercié – Gloria Victis (sculpture)
• Claude Monet – The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil
• Albert Joseph Moore – Shells
• Thomas Moran – Chasm of the Colorado
• Berthe Morisot – The Butterfly Hunt
• John Pettie – Jacobites
• Camille Pissarro – Portrait of Cézanne
• Illarion Pryanishnikov – Episode in the War of 1812
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir – La loge, La Parisienne
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  • The Damsel of the Sanct Grael or Holy Grail
  • Proserpine (Tate Britain)
• Alfred Sisley – Misty Morning
• James Tissot – On the Thames (approximate date)

Births

• March 9 – John Duncan Fergusson, Scottish Colourist painter (died 1961)
• March 23 – Henri Manguin, French Fauvist painter (died 1949)
• April 7 – Frederick Carl Frieseke, American-born painter (died 1939)
• May 11 – Einar Jónsson, Icelandic sculptor (died 1954)
• July 28 – Joaquín Torres García, Uruguayan painter (died 1949)
• October 16 – Otto Mueller, Silesian painter (died 1930)
• October 21 – Charles R. Knight, American animal painter (died 1953)
• date unknown
  • Arnold Friedman, American modernist painter (died 1946)
  • Julio Romero de Torres, Andalusian painter of female nudes (died 1930)

Deaths

• January 29 – John Christian Schetky, Scottish-born marine painter (born 1778)
• April 19 – Owen Jones, architect, interior designer, and pioneer of chromolithography (born 1809)
• April 20 – Alexander Hunter Murray, fur trader and artist (born 1818/1819)
• May 5 – Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, painter (born 1806)
• June 14 – Julien-Léopold Boilly, French draughtsman and watercolorist (born 1796)
• November 21 – Mariano Fortuny, painter (born 1838)
• December 6 – Egide Charles Gustave Wappers, painter (born 1803)
• October 28 – William Henry Rinehart, sculptor (born 1825)
• date unknown
  • Henry Bryan Ziegler, British landscape and portrait painter (born 1798)