The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#13901
William Morris Hunt
1824 - 1879 (55 years)
William Morris Hunt was an American painter. Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a similar group on his return to America. He became Boston's leading portrait and landscape painter, also working as a lithographer and sculptor. In 1871 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Many of his works were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Another disaster was the deterioration of the stone panels in the State Capitol at Albany, New York, on which a number of his murals had been painted.
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Vilhelm Kyhn
1819 - 1903 (84 years)
Peter Vilhelm Carl Kyhn was a Danish landscape painter who belonged to the generation of national romantic painters immediately after the Danish Golden Age and before the Modern Breakthrough. Even though he outlived many of his artistic peers by several decades, he remained a traditionalist and expressed strong criticism of many of the new trends in the painting of his day.
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Mark Veyngerov
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Mark Leonidovich Veyngerov was a Soviet Physicist, USSR State Prize 1946 awardee for papers in the field of Optics. Biography Mark Veyngerov was born in Saint Petersburg in the family of medical doctors: Cecilia Borisovna Brushteyn was a physiotherapist and Leonid Iosifovich Veyngerov was a wide-known balneologist. Leonid Veyngerov was the author of such well-known medical books as Compendium to recipe with a description of the most common drugs that are not included in the Russian pharmacopoeia . He also was the leader of the "Aid Society for Poor Jews" and was the Main Secretary of St. Pe...
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William Thornton
1759 - 1828 (69 years)
William Thornton was an American physician, inventor, painter and architect who designed the United States Capitol. He also served as the first Architect of the Capitol and first Superintendent of the United States Patent Office.
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George Inness
1825 - 1894 (69 years)
George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School at the start of his career. He also studied the Old Masters, and artists of the Barbizon school during later trips to Europe. There he was introduced to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, which was significant for him; he expressed that spiritualism in the works of his maturity .
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Clive Bell
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form. Biography Early life and education Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881, the third of four children of William Heward Bell and Hannah Taylor Cory . He had an elder brother , an elder sister , and a younger sister . His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales – "a family which drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it on the destruction of wild animals."...
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Tadeusz Pruszkowski
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Tadeusz Pruszkowski was a Polish painter and art teacher, known primarily for his portraits. Biography He began his artistic studies in 1904 at the , under Konrad Krzyżanowski. In 1908, he continued his studies in Paris, where he associated with Polish writers and artists belonging to the Royalist Club, a monarchist organization. He also met his future wife there. After graduating, he travelled to Switzerland and Algeria; returning to Poland in 1911 and helping to create an artists' society known as "Young Art" . In 1914, he held his first solo exhibition at the "". In 1915, all the members...
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Pinturicchio
1454 - 1513 (59 years)
Pinturicchio, or Pintoricchio , also known as Benetto di Biagio or Sordicchio, was an Italian painter during the Renaissance. He acquired his nickname because of his small stature and he used it to sign some of his artworks that were created during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Richard Wilson
1713 - 1782 (69 years)
Richard Wilson was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognised as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country". In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work compiled by Paul Spencer-Longhurst is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British...
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LeConte Stewart
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
LeConte Stewart was a Latter-day Saint artist primarily known for his landscapess of rural Utah. His media included oils, watercolors, pastel and charcoal, as well as etchings, linocuts, and lithographs. His home/studio in Kaysville, Utah is on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Scott Burton
1939 - 1989 (50 years)
Scott Burton was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze. Early years Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Burton was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.
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Gojmir Anton Kos
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Gojmir Anton Kos was a Slovene academy-trained painter, photographer, and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Gojmir was born in the town of Gorizia , where his father, the renowned historian Franc Kos from the vicinity of Škofja Loka in Carniola, taught at the State Gymnasium. His mother was a Friulian from the Austrian Littoral. Gojmir's older brother Milko later also became a prominent historian and chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
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Paul Delaroche
1797 - 1856 (59 years)
Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche was a French painter who achieved his greater successes painting historical scenes. He became famous in Europe for his melodramatic depictions that often portrayed subjects from English and French history. The emotions emphasised in Delaroche's paintings appeal to Romanticism while the detail of his work along with the deglorified portrayal of historic figures follow the trends of Academicism and Neoclassicism. Delaroche aimed to depict his subjects and history with pragmatic realism. He did not consider popular ideals and norms in his creations, but rather painted al...
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Harold Rosenberg
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Harold Rosenberg was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. From 1962 until his death, he was the art critic of The New Yorker.
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Herbert Hawkes
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Herbert Edwin Hawkes was an American mathematician and an experienced educator and had first-hand knowledge of the various problems, boys face during their college life. His 25-year tenure as Dean of Columbia College, the longest of any Columbia College dean, earned him the title "the dean of American college deans".
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Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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Robert Walker
1607 - 1658 (51 years)
Robert Walker was an English portrait painter, notable for his portraits of the "Lord Protector" Oliver Cromwell and other distinguished parliamentarians of the period. He was influenced by Van Dyck, and many of his paintings can now be found at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Henry Raeburn
1756 - 1823 (67 years)
Sir Henry Raeburn was a Scottish portrait painter. He served as Portrait Painter to King George IV in Scotland. Biography Raeburn was born the son of a manufacturer in Stockbridge, on the Water of Leith: a former village now within the city of Edinburgh. He had an older brother, born in 1744, called William Raeburn. His ancestors were believed to have been soldiers, and may have taken the name "Raeburn" from a hill farm in Annandale, held by Sir Walter Scott's family. Orphaned, he was supported by William and placed in Heriot's Hospital, where he received an education. At the age of fifteen ...
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Michael Avon Oeming
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michael Avon Oeming is an American comic book creator, both as an artist and writer. Career Oeming is a fan of ancient mythology, having written or drawn several projects centering on the Norse gods. He frequently collaborates with long-time friend Bryan J. L. Glass and with Brian Michael Bendis. He is part of the M.O.B. crew of comic book creators, along with David Mack, Brian Bendis and Daniel Berman.
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Arthur Godfrey
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Arthur Morton Godfrey was an American radio and television broadcaster and entertainer who was sometimes introduced by his nickname The Old Redhead. At the peak of his success, in the early to mid 1950s, Godfrey was heard on radio and seen on television up to six days a week, sometimes for as many as nine separate broadcasts for CBS. His programs included Arthur Godfrey Time , Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts , Arthur Godfrey and His Friends , The Arthur Godfrey Digest and King Arthur Godfrey and His Round Table .
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Alexander Stirling Calder
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
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Jayant S. Vaidya
Jayant S. Vaidya is a British-Indian surgeon-oncologist and clinical academic who, together with Michael Baum and Jeffrey Tobias, developed the technique called targeted intra-operative radiotherapy . He is a professor of surgery and oncology at the University College London, London and the author of two books on breast cancer, one on tobacco eradication, and over 200 academic articles.
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Carlo Carrà
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
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Lee Greene Richards
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Lee Greene Richards was a famous Utah portrait artist. Many of his works can be found at the City and County Building in Salt Lake City, Utah. Biography Richards was the son of Levi W. and Lula Greene Richards. His father was the son of Levi Richards who was the brother of Joseph Smith's physician in Nauvoo, Illinois. He was actually named Levi after his father but went by Lee. Levi W. Richards and his mother Sarah Griffith Richards had been painters. Lee Richards was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1895 he served as an LDS missionary in England....
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T. Earl Pardoe
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
Thomas Earl Pardoe was the first head of the Brigham Young University drama program. One of the main theaters in the Harris Fine Arts Center at BYU is named for him and his wife, Kathryn Bassett Pardoe, who was also an influential drama teacher at BYU.
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Bernardo Bellotto
1721 - 1780 (59 years)
Bernardo Bellotto , was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto. This caused some confusion, however Bellotto’s work is more sombre in color than Canaletto's and his depiction of clouds and shadows brings him closer to Dutch painting.
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Fritz von Uhde
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Fritz von Uhde was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay in-between Realism and Impressionism, he was once known as "Germany's outstanding impressionist" and he became one of the first painters to introduce plein-air painting in his country.
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Peter Janssen
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Johann Peter Theodor Janssen was a German historical painter. Biography Janssen was born in Düsseldorf, son of the engraver , by whom he was first instructed before studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Eduard Bendemann. He is principally known through a series of decorative works whose monumental style and sound naturalism won him a reputation as one of the foremost historical painters of his time. He became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1877 and its director in 1895, and was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1885. In Berli...
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Liu Haisu
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Liu Haisu was a prominent twentieth-century Chinese painter and a noted art educator. He excelled in Chinese painting and oil painting. He was one of the four pioneers of Chinese modern art who earned the title of "The Four Great Academy Presidents".
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Domenico Ghirlandaio
1448 - 1494 (46 years)
Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi , professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, also spelt as Ghirlandajo, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, along with Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers and Sandro Botticelli. Ghirlandaio led a large and efficient workshop that included his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Many apprentices passed through Ghirlandaio's workshop, including the famous Michelangelo.
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Kræsten Iversen
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Kristen "Kræsten" Iversen was a Danish artist who is remembered both for his paintings and his painted glass windows. He was a member of the Bornholm school of painters and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts .
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Wilhelm Trübner
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Wilhelm Trübner was a German realist painter of the circle of Wilhelm Leibl. Biography Trübner was born in Heidelberg. He was the third son of a silver- and goldsmith, Johann Georg Trübner, and his wife Anna Maria. In 1867 he began training as a goldsmith in Hanau, and met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting. In that year he began studies at the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe under Karl Friedrich Schick. He was influenced by artists he met in Karlsruhe, such as Hans Canon and Feodor Dietz. In 1869 he began studying at the Kunstacademie in Munich, where he was greatly impressed by an international exhibition of paintings by Leibl and Gustave Courbet.
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Hans Schuler
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Hans K. Schuler was a German-born American sculptor and monument maker. He was the first American sculptor ever to win the Salon Gold Medal. His works are in several important museum collections, and he also created many public monuments, mostly for locations in Baltimore, Maryland and in the Washington, D.C. area. For over a quarter of a century he served as president of the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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Luca Giordano
1634 - 1705 (71 years)
Luca Giordano was an Italian late-Baroque painter and printmaker in etching. Fluent and decorative, he worked successfully in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, before spending a decade in Spain. Early life and training Born in Naples, Giordano was the son of the painter Antonio Giordano. In around 1650 he was apprenticed to Ribera on the recommendation of the viceroy of Naples and his early work was heavily influenced by his teacher. Like Ribera, he painted many half-length figures of philosophers, either imaginary portraits of specific figures, or generic types.
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Franklin C. Crow
#13937
Anders Zorn
1860 - 1920 (60 years)
Anders Leonard Zorn was a Swedish painter. He attained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etching artist. Among Zorn's portrait subjects include King Oscar II of Sweden and three American Presidents: Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.
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Eli Whitney
1765 - 1825 (60 years)
Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States and prolonged the institution. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost much of his profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention to securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army.
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Tom Thomson
1877 - 1917 (40 years)
Thomas John Thomson was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career, he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas. His works consist almost entirely of landscapes, depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. He used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's accidental death by drowning at 39 shortly before the founding of the Group of Seven is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art.
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Joseph Médard Carrière
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Joseph Médard Carrière , was an award-winning Franco-Ontarian French-language scholar. He was most noted as a collector of French folklore from the Midwest of the United States. He also served as a President of the American Folklore Society.
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William de Leftwich Dodge
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
William de Leftwich Dodge was an Americann artist best known for his murals, which were commissioned for both public and private buildings. Early life and education Dodge was born at Liberty, Virginia in the Piedmont near Lynchburg. In 1879, his mother, Mary de Leftwich Dodge, an aspiring artist, moved her family to Europe. After living initially in Munich they moved to Paris, where she worked on art. Dodge later followed her example and became an artist. He spent most of his childhood years in France, where his mother was working on art. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts and took first place in the examinations in 1881.
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Józef Peszka
1767 - 1831 (64 years)
Józef Peszka was a Polish painter and art professor; known mostly for his portraits and watercolor landscapes. Biography His first drawing lessons were with , an Austrian painter living in Kraków. He then studied painting in Warsaw with Franciszek Smuglewicz. After doing a portrait of Hugo Kołłątaj, he was introduced to members of the Great Sejm and earned a commission to do portraits of other prominent political figures; work which kept him occupied until 1792.
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Robert Anning Bell
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Robert Anning Bell was an English artist and designer. Early life Robert Anning Bell was born in London on 14 April 1863, the son of Robert George Bell, a cheesemonger, and Mary Charlotte Knight. He studied at University College School, the Westminster School of Art, and the Royal Academy Schools, followed by a time in Paris.
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Thomas Couture
1815 - 1879 (64 years)
Thomas Couture was a French history painter and teacher. He taught such later luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Ward Dunsmore, Karel Javůrek, William Morris Hunt, and Joseph-Noël Sylvestre.
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Sándor Bortnyik
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Sándor Bortnyik was a Hungarian painter and graphic designer. His work was greatly influenced by Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism. Life Born in Târgu Mureș, Transylvania, he moved to Weimar in 1922 and was connected to the Bauhaus. When he moved back to Hungary he founded an art school in Budapest, where he followed Bauhaus principles.
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Harriet George Barclay
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Harriet George Barclay was an American botanist, plant ecologist, nature conservationist, and artist. Biography Barclay was a professor at the University of Tulsa. She later became Chair of the Botany Department in 1953.
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Emma Montgomery McRae
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Emma Montgomery McRae was a Professor of English literature. Born Mary Emma Montgomery in Loveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of William Montgomery and Anna née Newton. Her family moved to Indiana when she was five. Emma completed her undergraduate work at Brookfield Academy, Indiana, then she taught at a school in Vevay, Indiana.
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Sergei Yefimovich Zakharov
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Sergei Yefimovich Zakharov was a Russian Soviet painter, watercolorist, graphic artist, and interior designer, who lived and worked in Leningrad . He was a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, and regarded as one of the brightest representatives of the Leningrad school of painting and graphics, most famous for his watercolors of fruits and flowers.
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L. Scott Pendlebury
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
L. Scott Pendlebury or Laurence Scott Pendlebury was an Australian landscape and portrait artist and teacher. He married fellow artist Eleanor Constance "Nornie" Gude in January 1943 and they were the parents of Anne Lorraine Pendlebury , a stage, film and TV actress; and Andrew Scott Pendlebury a guitarist-songwriter. Pendlebury won the Wynne Prize four times for his landscape paintings with The Chicory Kiln, Phillip Island , Constitution Dock, Hobart , Old Farmhouse and Road to Whistlewood . He was a finalist in the Archibald Prize twenty-four times, including Nornie Gude and Anne and Drew Pendlebury .
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Charles Marion Russell
1864 - 1926 (62 years)
Charles Marion Russell , also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell, was an American artist of the American Old West. He created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Native Americans, and landscapes set in the western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. He is known as "the cowboy artist" and was also a storyteller and author. He became an advocate for Native Americans in the west, supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana. In 1916, Congress passed legislation to create the Rocky Boy Re...
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