1850s
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
![Stryge (1853) is a print by French etcher Charles Méryon depicting one of the chimera of the Galerie des chimères of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral.](/images/thumb/200px-Stryge_by_Meryon.jpg)
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." --"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" (1852) by Karl Marx "To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so [...]. --Pierre-Joseph Proudhon |
![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.](/images/thumb/200px-The_Crystal_Palace.jpg)
![Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) by Roger Fenton](/images/thumb/200px-Valley_of_the_Shadow_of_Death_(Roger_Fenton).jpg)
![The Gleaners (1857) by Jean-François Millet](/images/thumb/200px-Ther_Gleaners_by_Jean-François_Millet.jpg)
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The 1850s was a very turbulent decade, as wars such as the Crimean War, shifted and shook European politics, as well as the expansion of colonization towards the Far East, which also sparked conflicts like the Second Opium War. At the mean time, The United States saw its peak on mass migration to the American West, that particularly made the nation experience an economic boom, as well as a rapidly increasing population.
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Art and culture
- Bohemianism
- 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
- Frederick Law Olmsted's design for New York's Central Park
Literature
- The Stones of Venice (1851-53) by John Ruskin
- Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) by Melville
- "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855) by Walt Whitman
- Chemistry of Common Life (1855) by James Finlay Weir Johnston
- Les Fleurs du mal (1857) Charles Baudelaire
- Madame Bovary (1857) Gustave Flaubert
- The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
Visual culture
- The Stone Breakers (1850) by Gustave Courbet
- A Burial At Ornans (1850) by Gustave Courbet
- The Crystal Palace (1851) - Joseph Paxton
- Poem of the Soul, Nightmare (1854) - Louis Janmot
- The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53) - John Martin
- Fading Away (1858) - Henry Peach Robinson
- The red splodge representing the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1854) in Gustave Doré's The History of Holy Russia
- Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush (1856), photo by Oscar Gustave Rejlander
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