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,
#13951
Rosso Fiorentino
1494 - 1540 (46 years)
Giovanni Battista di Jacopo , known as Rosso Fiorentino , or Il Rosso, was an Italian Mannerist painter who worked in oil and fresco and belonged to the Florentine school. Biography Born in Florence with the red hair that gave him his nickname, Rosso first trained in the studio of Andrea del Sarto alongside his contemporary, Pontormo. His early works include Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist , Cherub Playing a Lute and The Infant Saint John the Baptist , all produced around 1521. In late 1523, Rosso moved to Rome, where he was exposed to the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, a...
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Piero di Cosimo
1462 - 1522 (60 years)
Piero di Cosimo , also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He is most famous for the mythological and allegorical subjects he painted in the late Quattrocento; he is said to have abandoned these to return to religious subjects under the influence of Savonarola, the preacher who exercised a huge sway in Florence in the 1490s, and had a similar effect on Botticelli. The High Renaissance style of the new century had little influence on him, and he retained the straightforward realism of his figures, which combines with an often whimsical treatment of his subjects...
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F. Gao
#13954
Gentile Bellini
1429 - 1507 (78 years)
Gentile Bellini was an Italian painter of the school of Venice. He came from Venice's leading family of painters, and at least in the early part of his career was more highly regarded than his younger brother Giovanni Bellini, the reverse of the case today. From 1474 he was the official portrait artist for the Doges of Venice, and as well as his portraits he painted a number of very large subjects with multitudes of figures, especially for the Scuole Grandi of Venice, wealthy confraternities that were very important in Venetian patrician social life.
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Sha Menghai
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Sha Menghai , born Shi Wenruo , was a great master of calligraphy in China. He also was a master of Chinese seal carving , a theoretician of traditional Chinese art, and a master of Shanghai School art. Sha Wenhan is his brother.
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Cima da Conegliano
1459 - 1517 (58 years)
Giovanni Battista Cima, also called Cima da Conegliano , was an Italian Renaissance painter, who mostly worked in Venice. He can be considered part of the Venetian school, though he was also influenced by Antonello da Messina, in the emphasis he gives to landscape backgrounds and the tranquil atmosphere of his works. Once formed his style did not change greatly. He mostly painted religious subjects, often on a small scale for homes rather than churches, but also a few, mostly small, mythological ones.
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Róbert Berény
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Róbert Berény was a Hungarian painter, one of the avant-garde group known as The Eight who introduced cubism and expressionism to Hungarian art in the early twentieth century before the First World War. He had studied and exhibited in Paris as a young man and was also considered one of the Hungarian Fauves.
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini
1598 - 1680 (82 years)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture. As one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful ..." In addition, he was a painter and a man of the theatre: he wrote, directed and acted in plays , for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery.
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Berthe Morisot
1841 - 1895 (54 years)
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
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Henry Moss Traquair
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Henry Moss Traquair, FRSE, PRCSE was a Scottish ophthalmic surgeon who made important contributions to the science of perimetry and the use of visual field testing in the diagnosis of disease. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1939/40 and President of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom.
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Laurits Tuxen
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Laurits Regner Tuxen CVO was a Danish painter and sculptor specialising in figure painting. He was also associated with the Skagen Painters. He was the first head of Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, an art school established in the 1880s to provide an alternative to the education offered by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
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Duncan Grant
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a Scottish painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets, and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. His father was Bartle Grant, a "poverty-stricken" major in the army, and much of his early childhood was spent in India and Burma. He was a grandson of Sir John Peter Grant, 12th Laird of Rothiemurchus, KCB, GCMG, and sometime Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. Grant was also the first cousin twice removed of John Grant, 13th Earl of Dysart .
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Edith Head
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Edith Head was an American costume designer who won a record eight Academy Awards for Best Costume Design between 1949 and 1973, making her the most awarded woman in the Academy's history. Head is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential costume designers in film history.
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Charles Dana Gibson
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Charles Dana Gibson was an American illustrator who created the Gibson Girl, an iconic representation of the beautiful and independent Euro-American woman at the turn of the 20th century. He published his illustrations in Life magazine and other major national publications for more than 30 years, becoming editor in 1918 and later owner of the general interest magazine.
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Frederic Edwin Church
1826 - 1900 (74 years)
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
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Chang Dai-chien
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Chang Dai-chien or Zhang Daqian was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Originally known as a guohua painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter. In addition, he is regarded as one of the most gifted master forgers of the twentieth century.
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Laurence Binyon
1869 - 1943 (74 years)
Robert Laurence Binyon, CH was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray. He studied at St Paul's School, London and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891. He worked for the British Museum from 1893 until his retirement in 1933. In 1904 he married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell, with whom he had three daughters, including the artist Nicolete Gray.
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Paul Fjelde
1892 - 1984 (92 years)
Paul Fjelde was a noted American sculptor and educator. Background Paul Fjelde was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was the son of Jacob Fjelde, who was a well-known sculptor in Norway when he emigrated to the United States in 1887. After Jacob’s untimely death at age 36, the Fjelde family moved to North Dakota in 1902. Margarethe Fjelde homesteaded with her four children in Burleigh County, North Dakota. Fjelde studied art in Valley City, North Dakota at the State Normal School, now the Valley City State University. He subsequently went to study under Chicago based sculptor Lorado Taft. H...
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Harvey Fite
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Harvey Fite was a pioneering American sculptor, painter and earth artist best known for his monumental land sculpture Opus 40. A teacher, innovator and Woodstock artist of many talents, he was primarily a sculptor of wood and stone. Fite is also known for founding the fine arts program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
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Parmigianino
1503 - 1540 (37 years)
Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola , also known as Francesco Mazzola or, more commonly, as Parmigianino , was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma. His work is characterized by a "refined sensuality" and often elongation of forms and includes Vision of Saint Jerome and the iconic if somewhat anomalous Madonna with the Long Neck , and he remains the best known artist of the first generation whose whole careers fall into the Mannerist period.
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Robert G. Vignola
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Robert G. Vignola was an Italian-American actor, screenwriter, and film director. A former stage actor, he appeared in many motion pictures produced by Kalem Company and later moved to directing, becoming one of the silent screen's most prolific directors. He directed a handful of films in the early years of sound films, but his career essentially ended in the silent era.
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Calvin Brainerd Cady
1851 - 1928 (77 years)
Calvin Brainerd Cady was an American musician, music teacher, leading educational philosopher and writer of the progressive era of education in his subject area. Cady founded the music department at the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He became known for his pedagogical theories while working with John Dewey at the University Elementary School, today's University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and later at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Cady was a leader in advocating for degree programs in music within u...
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Nicolas de Staël
1914 - 1955 (41 years)
Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles. Early life Nicolas de Staël was born Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein in Saint Petersburg, into the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, and his second wife, Lubov Vladimirovna Berednikova . De Staël's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; both his father and stepmother died in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de...
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William Powell Frith
1819 - 1909 (90 years)
William Powell Frith was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting The Sleeping Model as his Diploma work. He has been described as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth".
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Nikolai Lunin
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lunin was a Russian Empire and later Soviet scientist who was the first to discover the existence of vitamins. As a student in Basel, he fed mice on a diet of proteins, fats, sugar, salts and water, but they died. He concluded that in addition to casein, fat, milk sugar and salts, milk must contain other substances that are indispensable for nutrition.
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Betty Parsons
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.
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Franz Kline
1910 - 1962 (52 years)
Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s.
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Alan Trevor Watson
#13979
Gregor von Bochmann
1850 - 1930 (80 years)
Gregor von Bochmann was a Baltic-German landscape and genre painter. Biography His father was a forest warden for the Governorate of Estonia, who had been ennobled due to his service in the Crimean War. Bochmann frequently travelled around the country with him, developing his ability to observe nature. From 1862 to 1868, he studied at the Gustav Adolf Grammar School in Tallinn, where his art teacher, Theodor Albert Sprengel, recognized his talent and obtained a scholarship for him to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
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Theodore Robinson
1852 - 1896 (44 years)
Theodore Robinson was an American painter best known for his Impressionist landscapes. He was one of the first American artists to take up Impressionism in the late 1880s, visiting Giverny and developing a close friendship with Claude Monet. Several of his works are considered masterpieces of American Impressionism.
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Henry Tonks
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher. He was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the French Impressionists; he exhibited with the New English Art Club, and was an associate of many of the more progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George Clausen.
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John Phillips
1719 - 1795 (76 years)
John Phillips was an early American educator and the cofounder of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, along with his wife, Elizabeth Phillips. He was a major donor to Dartmouth College, where he served as a trustee. He also made significant donations to Harvard College and Princeton University.
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Lyonel Feininger
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the US and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends.
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Peter J Fleming
#13985
Thomas Nast
1840 - 1902 (62 years)
Thomas Nast was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist often considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon". He was a sharp critic of "Boss" Tweed and the Tammany Hall Democratic party political machine. He created a modern version of Santa Claus and the political symbol of the elephant for the Republican Party . Contrary to popular belief, Nast did not create Uncle Sam , Columbia , or the Democratic donkey, although he did popularize those symbols through his artwork. Nast was associated with the magazine Harper's Weekly from 1859 to 1860 and from 1862 until 1886.
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Antoine Bourdelle
1861 - 1929 (68 years)
Antoine Bourdelle , born Émile Antoine Bordelles, was an influential and prolific French sculptor and teacher. He was a student of Auguste Rodin, a teacher of Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and an important figure in the Art Deco movement and the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture.
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William Richard Joseph Cook
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Sir William Richard Joseph Cook, was a British civil servant and mathematician. A graduate of Bristol University, he joined the staff of the Woolwich Arsenal in 1928, working on the 6-inch naval guns and the 3-inch antiaircraft rocket. During the Second World War he was deputy controller of the Projectile Development Establishment. After the war he became director of the Ministry of Supply's Rocket Propulsion Establishment at Westcott, Buckinghamshire. In 1947 he joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service, serving as its chief from 1950 to 1954, when he became deputy head of the Weapons Group of the newly created United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority .
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Joseph Wright of Derby
1734 - 1797 (63 years)
Joseph Wright , styled Joseph Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution".
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Mark Gertler
1891 - 1939 (48 years)
Mark Gertler was a British painter of figure subjects, portraits and still-life. His early life and his relationship with Dora Carrington were the inspiration for Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel. The characters of Loerke in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Gombauld in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow were based on him.
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Józef Mroszczak
1910 - 1975 (65 years)
Józef Mroszczak was a Polish graphic designer and representative of the Polish School of Posters. Education After graduating from high school in his hometown in 1928, he started his studies at Cracow’s School of Decorative Arts and Art Industry , and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule and the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchtanstalt in Vienna’s Academy of Graphic Arts .
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Amy Marie Charles
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Amy Marie Charles was professor of English literature at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a scholar of the seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert. Charles wrote a biography of the Herbert .
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Aelbert Cuyp
1620 - 1691 (71 years)
Aelbert Jacobszoon Cuyp or Cuijp was one of the leading Dutch Golden Age painters, producing mainly landscapes. The most famous of a family of painters, the pupil of his father, Jacob Gerritszoon Cuyp , he is especially known for his large views of Dutch riverside scenes in a golden early morning or late afternoon light. He was born and died in Dordrecht.
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Birger Sandzén
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Sven Birger Sandzén , known more commonly as Birger Sandzén, was a Swedish painter best known for his landscapes. He produced most of his work while working as an art professor at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas.
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George Stubbs
1724 - 1806 (82 years)
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. He enjoyed royal patronage. His painting, Whistlejacket hangs in the National G...
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Adolph Gottlieb
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker. Early life and education Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York City in 1903 to Jewish parents. From 1920–1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which, having determined to become an artist he left high school at the age of 17 and worked his passage to Europe on a merchant ship. He traveled in France and Germany for a year. He lived in Paris for six months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
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Daniel P. Friedman
#13997
Natalia Goncharova
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds , Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail , and with Larionov invented Rayonism . She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.
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Evangelinos Apostolides Sophocles
1807 - 1883 (76 years)
Evangelinos Apostolides Sophocles was a professor of classics and Modern Greek at Harvard University, and lexicographer. He was born in Tsangarada, Thessaly, Ottoman Empire, and he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is considered to be a pioneer of Modern Greek studies.
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Egon Schiele
1890 - 1918 (28 years)
Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was an Austrian Expressionist painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. Gustav Klimt, a figurative painter of the early 20th century, was a mentor to Schiele.
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David Wilkie
1785 - 1841 (56 years)
Sir David Wilkie was a Scottish painter, especially known for his genre scenes. He painted successfully in a wide variety of genres, including historical scenes, portraits, including formal royal ones, and scenes from his travels to Europe and the Middle East. His main base was in London, but he died and was buried at sea, off Gibraltar, returning from his first trip to the Middle East. He was sometimes known as the "people's painter".
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