French artist Claude Monet, fleeing from the Franco-Prussian War, arrives in London

Whistler paints his mother and calls the picture Arrangement in Grey and Black

Whistler begins to paint his Nocturnes, a revolutionary series of night-time images on the river Thames

The American portrait-painter John Singer Sargent makes London his home and begins an immensely successful career

Gwen John persuades a reluctant father to allow her to follow her younger brother to the Slade School of Art in London

Augustus John meets his favourite subject Dorothy McNeill, to whom he gives the Gypsy name Dorelia

The part-time English painter L.S. Lowry begins a lifetime career in a Manchester property company

Walter Sickert and other painters, sharing his preference for everyday subjects, adopt the name Camden Town Group

Walter Sickert paints Ennui, depicting a difficult or dreary moment in a marriage

Wyndham Lewis and others launch Vorticism with a new magazine, Blast

Stanley Spencer joins the Royal Army Medical Corps, with whom he finds a wealth of subject matter

The Irish painter Jack Yeats develops a romantic Expressionist style, with a new interest in Celtic myth

John Singer Sargent completes Gassed, a powerful image of one of the particular horrors of the recent war

Four Scottish Colourists (Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe) exhibit together in Paris

Stanley Spencer completes his large visionary canvas The Resurrection: Cookham

Stanley Spencer begins his murals in the Memorial Chapel for Henry Sandham at Burghclere, in Hampshire

The British artist Graham Sutherland, after an early career as a printmaker, takes up painting relatively late in life

British painter Francis Bacon has his first solo show in London

William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore open a school of art with a distinctive style, known from its location as the Euston Road School

Leading British artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson marry

English painter Francis Bacon creates a sensation with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

Sadler's Wells Ballet moves to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (and is known from 1956 as the Royal Ballet)

British artist Bridget Riley creates patterns that produce unexpected optical effects, in a style that becomes known as op art

A Bigger Splash, by English painter David Hockney, casts a new light on sunlit swimming pools

British artist David Hockney paints a striking triple portrait in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy