From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Skull with a Cigarette (1886) - Vincent van Gogh

Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884), a composition by Alphonse Allais. It consists of nine blank measures and predates comparable works by John Cage ("4′33″") by a considerable margin.

Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin: "Basel" version, 1880

The Minotaur (1885) by George Frederic Watts

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) - Georges Seurat

Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Eugène Bataille

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Art and culture

• Friedrich Nietzsche publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
• Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky writes The Brothers Karamazov.
• Robert Louis Stevenson publishes Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• First edition of Oxford English Dictionary published.
• Arthur Conan Doyle publishes his first Sherlock Holmes tale.
• Frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff to Joséphin Péladan’s Istar (1888)
• Incoherents, Parisian art movement

Technology

• Development and commercial production of electric lighting
• Development and commercial production of gasoline-powered automobile
• First commercial production and sales of phonographs and phonograph recordings.
• First steel frame construction of "sky-scrapers"

Other

• Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia, erupts cataclysmically; 36,000 people are killed, the majority by the resulting tsunami

Births

Guillaume Apollinaire - James Joyce - Virginia Woolf - Edgar Varèse - Franz Kafka - Sax Rohmer - Mussolini - Lon Chaney, Sr. - José Ortega y Gasset - Gaston Bachelard - D.H. Lawrence - Sylvia Beach

Deaths

Notes

• Trends and developments: Paris holds the Exposition Universelle with the Eiffel tower as main attraction - Arts and Crafts Movement - Art Nouveau - start of the Decadent movement - manifesto of the Symbolist movement - peak popularity of music halls - rise of Tin Pan Alley - introduction of phonograph - introduction of cars - Moulin Rouge - introduction of electric lighting - Jack the Ripper

• Art: Vincent Van Gogh - post-impressionism

• Literature: Flatland (1884) - À rebours (1884) - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) - Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885) - Henry Spencer Ashbee - Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)

• Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) - Seurat
• Skull with a Cigarette (1886) - Vincent van Gogh

Events

• 1880 Skene's glands discovered by Alexander Skene
• 1881 by 1881, the French government withdrew its support from the official Salons
• 1882 'Zuiderpershuis' built
• 1883 The Shapeless Polyp Floated along the Bank, a Sort of Hideous, Smiling Cyclops (1883) - Odilon Redon
• 1884 Flatland (1880) - Edwin A. Abbott
• 1885 Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885) - Henry Spencer Ashbee
• 1886 Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) - Richard Von Krafft-Ebing
• 1887 Du Fétichisme dans l’amour 1887 - Alfred Binet
• 1888 Jack the Ripper kills his first victim
• 1889 Paris Exposition
  • More than a million people took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel tower when it was opened at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. [May 2006]

• Théorie de la décadence (1883) -- Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883)