The year 1894 in art involved some significant events.

Events

• February – Oscar Wilde's play Salome is first published in English, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.
• April – The Yellow Book (edited by Henry Harland with Aubrey Beardsley as art editor) begins publication by John Lane and Elkin Mathews – The Bodley Head in London.
• June 5 – Opening of Racławice Panorama in Lwów.
• August 23 – Jack Butler Yeats marries fellow artist Mary Cottenham White.
• The Della Robbia Pottery is established as part of the Arts and Crafts movement by Harold Rathbone and Conrad Dressler in Birkenhead, England.
• Lucien Pissarro sets up the Eragny Press in England.
• Bernard Berenson publishes The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, with an Index to their Works.

Awards

Works

• Lawrence Alma-Tadema – Spring (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
• Charles Burton Barber
  • Queen Victoria with John Brown
  • Suspense
• Aubrey Beardsley
  • Self-portrait in bed (line block print)
  • Illustrations to Oscar Wilde's Salome
• Olga Boznańska – Girl with Chrysanthemums
• Edward Burne-Jones
  • Love Among the Ruins (copy in oils)
  • (with John Henry Dearle and William Morris) – Holy Grail tapestries (original versions completed)
• Gustave Caillebotte – The garden of the Petit Gennevilliers in winter
• Gustaf Cederström – Among the Homeless
• Paul Cézanne – Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier
• Herbert Dicksee – Silent Sympathy
• Árpád Feszty – Arrival of the Hungarians (cyclorama)
• Paul Gauguin
  • Breton Peasants (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
  • Oviri (ceramic sculpture, original cast in Musée d'Orsay)
• J. W. Godward – A Priestess
• Thomas Cooper Gotch – The Child Enthroned
• Paja Jovanović – The Takovo Uprising
• Max Liebermann – Der Garten des Waisenhauses in Amsterdam
• Maximilien Luce – Port of London, Night
• Frederick William MacMonnies – Bacchante and Infant Faun (bronze, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)
• Jacek Malczewski – Melancholia
• Henri Matisse – Woman Reading
• Claude Monet – Rouen Cathedral (The Portal, Morning Sun; Harmony in Blue) (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
• Edvard Munch
  • Anxiety (Munch Museum, Oslo)
  • Puberty (National Gallery, Oslo)
  • Love and Pain (Vampire) (Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden)
• Ernest Normand – The White Slave
• Władysław Podkowiński – Ecstasy
• Henrietta Rae – Psyche at the Throne of Venus
• Tom Roberts – The Golden Fleece
• Georges Rochegrosse – The Knight of the Flowers (Parsifal) (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
• Aleksander Sochaczewski – Farewell Europe!
• Solomon Joseph Solomon – Mrs Patrick Campbell as Paula Tanqueray
• Marie Spartali Stillman
  • Love Sonnets
  • A Rose from Armida's Garden
• Henry Ossawa Tanner – The Thankful Poor
• James Tissot
  • The Adoration of the Shepherds
  • What Our Lord Saw from the Cross
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – Woman Pulling Up Her Stocking (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
• Ferdinand Freiherr von Miller – J. Marion Sims (bronze)
• Fritz von Uhde – Noli me tangere
• Theodoor Verstraete – Spring in Schoore (Zeeland)
• Stanisław Wyspiański – Planty Park at Dawn

Births

• 9 January – Reg Gammon, English painter and illustrator (died 1997)
• 8 March – Wäinö Aaltonen, Finnish sculptor (died 1966)
• 17 March – Meredith Frampton, English portrait painter (died 1984)
• 10 April – Ben Nicholson, English abstract painter (died 1982)
• 19 April – Adolf Wissel, German painter, an official artist of Nazism (died 1973)
• 22 April – Evie Hone, Irish painter and stained glass artist (died 1955)
• 27 April – George Petty, American pin-up artist (died 1975)
• 17 May – Zora Petrović, one of the most significant representatives of Expressionism of color in Serbian art between two wars (died 1962)
• 6 June – Arthur Szyk, Polish-born illustrator and political artist (died 1951)
• 13 June – Jacques Henri Lartigue, French photographer and painter (died 1986)
• 28 June – Ronald Ossory Dunlop, Irish author and painter (died 1973)
• 2 July – André Kertész, Hungarian-born photographer (died 1985)
• 14 July – Dave Fleischer, Austrian-American animator, film director, and film producer (died 1979)
• 26 August – Gala Dalí, model and wife of Salvador Dalí (died 1982)
• 3 September – André Hébuterne, French painter (died 1992)
• 7 October – Doris Huestis Speirs, Canadian painter, ornithologist and poet (died 1989)
• 8 October – Risto Stijović, Serbian sculptor (died 1974)
• 14 October – E. E. Cummings, American poet and painter (died 1962)
• 4 November – Chafik Charobim, Egyptian painter (died 1975)
• 8 November – Norman Rockwell, American painter and illustrator (died 1978)
• 8 December – James Thurber, American cartoonist (died 1961)
• 27 December – Annot, German painter (died 1981)
• date unknown
  • Bror Hjorth, Swedish sculptor and painter (died 1968)
  • Ovartaci, born Louis Marcussen, Danish outsider artist (died 1985)

Deaths

• January 3 – Gustav Fabergé, German jeweler (born 1814)
• January 10 – Carl Werner, German watercolour painter (born 1808)
• January 29 – Armand Gautier, French painter (born 1825)
• February 13 – Georg Decker, Austro-Hungarian portrait painter (born 1818)
• February 21 – Gustave Caillebotte, French painter and arts patron (born 1848)
• April 12 – Lucy Madox Brown, English painter (born 1843)
• April 27 – Charles Laval, French painter (born 1862)
• June 17 – William Hart, Scottish American landscape painter (born 1823)
• July 1 – Jean-Joseph Carriès, French sculptor and ceramicist (born 1850)
• July 25 – Per Hasselberg, Swedish sculptor (born 1850)
• August 5 – Giovanni Muzzioli, Italian painter (born 1854)
• August 30 – Joseph Robinson Kirk, Irish sculptor (born 1821)
• September 26 – Launt Thompson, Irish sculptor (born 1833)
• date unknown – Charles Burton Barber, English genre painter (born 1845)