Events from the year 1859 in art.

• March 22 – Scottish National Gallery opens to the public in Edinburgh in neoclassical premises designed by W. H. Playfair.^[1][2]
• April 26 – William Morris marries his model, Jane Burden. Edward Burne-Jones presents them with a self-painted wardrobe.^[3]
• Frederic E. Church's The Heart of the Andes is exhibited in New York and draws 12,000 paying visitors.
• While attending the free school, the Académie Suisse, in Paris, Pissarro becomes friends with a number of younger artists also choosing to paint in a more realistic style, including Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne.
• This year's Paris Salon admits photographs.
• The Artists Rifles set up in London as a volunteer unit of the British Army.

• Peter Nicolai Arbo – Saint Olav at the Battle of Stiklestad
• Thomas Jones Barker – The Relief of Lucknow
• Albert Bierstadt – some dates approximate
  • Bernese Alps
  • Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies
  • The Wolf River, Kansas
• Philip Hermogenes Calderon – French Peasants Finding Their Stolen Child
• Frederic E. Church – The Heart of the Andes
• Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg – Monument to Nicholas I (Saint Petersburg), the world's largest equestrian statue supported only by the hind hooves of a rearing horse
• Thomas Couture – Daydreams
• Eugène Delacroix – Ovid among the Scythians (first version)
• Robert S. Duncanson – Landscape with Rainbow
• William Dyce – Beatrice (Lady with a Coronet of Jasmine)
• William Maw Egley – Omnibus Life in London
• Henri Fantin-Latour – Self-portrait
• Francesco Hayez – The Kiss, an expression of Italian Romanticism
• James Clarke Hook
  • The Brook
  • Luff, Boy!
• Arthur Hughes – The Long Engagement
• Charles-Auguste Lebourg – Gallic Victim (marble)
• Édouard Manet – The Absinthe Drinker (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)
• John Everett Millais – The Vale of Rest
• Jean-François Millet – The Angelus (completed version) (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
• Elisabet Ney – Arthur Schopenhauer (sculpture)
• Henry Nelson O'Neil – Home Again
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Bocca Baciata, the first of his portraits of single female figures (Fanny Cornforth)
• John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – Thoughts of the Past
• James McNeill Whistler – Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge

• January 28 – Ambrosia Tønnesen, Norwegian sculptor (died 1948)
• May 25 – William Logsdail, English landscape, portrait, and genre painter (died 1944)
• June 16 – Paja Jovanović, one of the leading three Serbian Realist painters, with Đorđe Krstić and Uroš Predić (died 1957)
• June 17 – Walter Osborne, Irish Impressionist painter (died 1903)
• August 22 – John Henry Dearle, English textile designer (died 1932)
• October 17 – Childe Hassam, American Impressionist painter (died 1935)
• November 10 – Théophile Steinlen, Swiss/French painter (died 1923)
• November 27 – William Bliss Baker, American landscape painter (died 1886)
• December 2 – Georges-Pierre Seurat, French post-Impressionist painter (died 1891)
• December 25 – Anna Palm de Rosa, Swedish-born painter (died 1924)
• December 30 – Henrietta Rae, English painter (died 1928)

• February 8 – William Edward West, American portrait painter (born 1788)^[4]
• March 3 – Cornelis Cels, Belgian painter of portraits and historical subjects (born 1778)
• March 24 – James Stark, English painter (born 1794)
• April 22 – Edward Villiers Rippingille, English painter (born c.1790)
• May 5 – Charles Robert Leslie, English genre works painter (born 1794)
• May 8 – José de Madrazo y Agudo, Spanish Neoclassicist painter (born 1781)
• June 7 – David Cox, English landscape painter (born 1783)^[5]
• June 20 – Hans Michelsen, Norwegian sculptor (born 1789)
• August 3 – Alexey Tyranov, Russian painter (born 1801)
• August 27 – Catharine Hermine Kølle, Norwegian adventurer and painter (born 1788)
• October 21 – William Jennys, American naïve art portrait painter (born 1774)^[6]
• November 13 - Ernesta Legnani Bisi, Italian painter and engraver (born 1788)
• November 17 – James Ward, English animal painter and engraver (born 1769)
• December 17 – Jan Feliks Piwarski, Polish painter and professor of art (born 1794)
• date unknown – John Bacon, English sculptor (born 1777)