1455 First printed engravings
Master ES becomes the first artist to produce engravings

1649 Hundred guilder for one print
Rembrandt creates an etching so desirable that it becomes known as the Hundred Guilder Print

1650 Japan's floating world
The pleasure districts of Edo and Kyoto provide the delights of ukiyo-e, the 'floating world'

1768 Technique of aquatint discovered
A French artist, Jean Baptiste le Prince, discovers the aquatint technique in printmaking

1780 Utamaro provides courtesans
Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro is a master of colour woodcuts, often depicting the courtesan district of Edo

1798 Senefelder discovers lithography
Austrian author Alois Senefelder, experimenting with grease and water on stone, discovers the principles of lithography

1825 Goya masters lithography
The elderly Francisco de Goya becomes the first great artist to attempt lithography

1830 Hokusai does Mount Fuji
Hokusai begins to publish his famous colour-printed views of Mount Fuji

1835 Fox Talbot exposes negative
Fox Talbot exposes the first photographic negatives, among them a view looking out through an oriel window in Lacock Abbey

1838 Birds of America
John James Audubon completes publication of the 435 plates forming his 4-volume Birds of America

1841 Fox Talbot patents calotype
Fox Talbot patents the 'calotype', introducing the negative-positive process that becomes standard in photography

1848 Cruikshank depicts dangers of alcohol
English caricaturist George Cruikshank publishes The Drunkard's Children in support of the developing Temperance movement

1849 David Roberts' Holy Land etc.
Scottish painter David Roberts completes publication of his 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia

1851 Collodion process in photography
English photographer Frederick Scott Archer publishes the details of his collodion process, a marked improvement on the earlier calotype negative

1855 First war photographer
Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

1855 Images published from Crimean front
English artist William Simpson sends sketches from the Crimea which achieve rapid circulation in Britain as tinted lithographs

1855 Christmas magazine with colour plates
The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

1861 Brady covers Civil War
Mathew Brady sends teams ot photographers to the various battle fronts to ensure a thorough photographic record of the American Civil War

1863 Cameron's first camera
48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

1878 Muybridge's Horse in Motion
English-born US photographer Eadweard Muybridge publishes closely linked photographs revealing how a horse goes through its paces

1879 Swan patents bromide paper
English physicist Joseph Swan receives a patent for bromide paper, which becomes the standard material for printing photographs

1882 Muybridge's photographs of motion
Eadweard Muybridge projects slow-motion images of a trotting horse as a demonstration at London's Royal Institution

1887 Muybridge's Animal Locomotion
Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

1890 How the Other Half Lives
In How the Other Half Lives David Riis alerts middle-class New Yorkers to the appalling slum conditions in lower Manhattan

1932 Cartier-Bresson has first exhibition
The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has his first exhibition, in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York

1933 Brassaï's Paris de Nuit
Hungarian photographer Brassaï publishes his photographs of the seedier side of Paris night life in Paris de Nuit

1936 Capa covers Spanish Civil War
Hungarian photographer Robert Capa achieves an unprecedented immediacy in his coverage of the Spanish Civil War

1947 Magnum Photos
Capa, Cartier-Bresson and others found Magnum, a cooperative of leading photographers running their own picture agency