1850s  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Alice Liddell as a beggar-maid (1858) by Lewis Carroll

Stryge (1853) is a print by French etcher Charles Méryon depicting a vampire-like legendary creature called strixes.

A huge iron and glass building, The Crystal Palace was one of the wonders of, if not the world, Britain. A rebuilt and expanded version of the building that originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, it stood in Sydenham from 1854 until 1936, and attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society. The name "Crystal Palace" was coined by the satirical magazine Punch. Today, it symbolizes modern architecture, the rise of consumer culture and the start of industrial design.

Poem of the Soul, Nightmare (1854 by Louis Janmot

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Art and culture

• rise of fine art photography
• the Great Exhibition (UK world fair)
• invention of pulp paper
• first purpose-built music halls
• start of "industrial design"
• start of modernism
• Baron Haussmann begins redesign of Paris, creating boulevards
• James Whistler, American artist, is one of many artists who flow into Paris after having read Murger's accounts
• New Orleans legalizes licensed prostitutes
• Olmsted's design for New York's Central Park

Literature

• Les Fleurs du mal (1857)
• Madame Bovary (1857)
• Artificial Paradises (1850s)
• The Origin of Species (1859)
• The Stones of Venice by Ruskin

Visual culture

• The Crystal Palace (1851) - Joseph Paxton
• Poem of the Soul, Nightmare (1854) - Louis Janmot (1814-1892)
• Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53) - John Martin
• Fading Away (1858) - Henry Peach Robinson

Births

• Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)
• Jose Posada (1851 - 1913)
• Antoni Gaudí (1852 - 1926)
• Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
• Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
• Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)
• H. Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925)
• Max Klinger (1857 - 1920)
• Émile Durkheim (1858 - 1917)
• Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)
• Havelock Ellis (1859 - 1939)

Deaths