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
Henry Lee Graves
1813 - 1881 (68 years)
Henry Lee Graves was the president of Baylor University from 1846 to 1851. Biography Henry Lee Graves, son of Thomas Graves, was born in Yanceyville, North Carolina in 1813. He married Rebecca Williams Graves on February 3, 1836. Rebecca, from Caswell County, North Carolina, was Graves's first cousin once-removed. Graves and Rebecca had four daughters as well as two sons . Rebecca died in 1865. Seven years later, Graves married Myra Lusk Crumpler, a wealthy widow who survived him by twenty-one years.
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Domenico Morelli
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Domenico Morelli was an Italian painter, who mainly produced historical and religious works. Morelli was immensely influential in the arts of the second half of the 19th century, both as director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, but also because of his rebelliousness against institutions: traits that flourished into the passionate, often patriotic, Romantic and later Symbolist subjects of his canvases. Morelli was the teacher of Vincenzo Petrocelli and Ulisse Caputo.
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Adam Abramowicz
1710 - 1776 (66 years)
Adam Abramowicz was a Polish Jesuit. He taught eloquence, philosophy and moral theology, and also contributed to the construction of several churches and colleges. He entered the Society of Jesus on August 20, 1726, in Vilnius. In the years 1743–1744 he was a prefect of the Jesuit schools and in the years 1744–1748 was a professor of philosophy at Vilnius University.
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Samuel Train Dutton
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Samuel Train Dutton was the superintendent of schools at Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a founder of the New York Peace Society and the treasurer of the American College for Girls at Constantinople.
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Piotr Buchkin
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Piotr Dmitrievich Buchkin was a Soviet and Russian painter, watercolorist, graphic artist, illustrator, and art teacher, Honored Arts Worker of the RSFSR. Buchkin lived and worked in Leningrad and was a member and one of the founders of the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of Russian Federation and representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for his portrait painting.
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John W. Gilmore
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
John Washington Gilmore was an American agronomist, educator and academic administrator who served as the first president of the University of Hawaii from 1908 to 1913. Biography He was born May 9, 1872, in White County, Arkansas, to Thomas Griffin and Emily Landrum Gilmore. He received his elementary and secondary education in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended Cornell University, obtaining the B.S. degree in 1898 and the M.S.A. degree in 1906.
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Thomas Ball
1819 - 1911 (92 years)
Thomas Ball was an American sculptor and musician. His work has had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States, especially in New England. Life He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Thomas Ball, a house and sign painter and Elizabeth Wyer Hall. His father died when he was twelve. After several odd jobs to help support his family he spent three years working at the New England Museum, the precursor to the Boston Museum. There he entertained the visitors by drawing portraits, playing the violin, and singing, and repaired mechanical toys. He then became an apprentice for the museum wood-carver Abel Brown.
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Josef Václav Myslbek
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Josef Václav Myslbek was a Czech sculptor and medalist credited with founding the modern Czech sculpting style. Life Josef grew up poor in a suburb of Prague. His family pushed him to become a shoemaker but he shirked the duty by getting a job with a succession of Czech sculptors. There was no school program for sculpting so he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague instead. Afterwards he opened his own sculpting studio. He became greatly inspired by the French sculpting style as well as related arts such as photography and literature. Josef Václav Myslbek influenced an entire...
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Lorus Pratt
1855 - 1923 (68 years)
Lorus Bishop Pratt was an American landscape painter and missionary. In 1890, he was one of a group of painters who studied in Paris under the sponsorship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , in preparation for painting murals at the nearly completed Salt Lake Temple.
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Thomas Jones
1742 - 1803 (61 years)
Thomas Jones was a Welsh landscape painter. He was a pupil of Richard Wilson and was best known in his lifetime as a painter of Welsh and Italian landscapes in the style of his master. However, Jones's reputation grew in the 20th century when more unconventional works by him, not originally intended for exhibition, came to light. Most notable among these is a series of views of Naples which he painted from 1782 to 1783. By breaking with the conventions of classical landscape painting in favour of direct observation, they look forward to the work of Camille Corot and the Barbizon School in the 19th century.
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François Gérard
1770 - 1837 (67 years)
François Pascal Simon Gérard , titled as Baron Gérard in 1809, was a prominent French painter. He was born in Rome, where his father occupied a post in the house of the French ambassador, and his mother was Italian. After he was made a baron of the Empire in 1809 by Emperor Napoleon, he was known formally as Baron Gérard.
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J. David Arnold
J. David Arnold is an American academic who is president and professor of psychology at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. Arnold has been vice president for academic and student affairs at Missouri Western State College, St. Joseph, Missouri. He also served as vice president for academic affairs and provost at Salve Regina University. In addition he has served as provost at St. John Fisher College and as a dean and grants officer at Clarion University. He started his academic career teaching psychology and writing at St. Lawrence University, a residential liberal arts college where he was te...
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Pitt Cobbett
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
William Pitt Cobbett was an Australian academic, jurist, and editor. Cobbett was the founding Challis Chair of Law of the University of Sydney Faculty of Law. Early life and education Born to Pitt Cobbett and Caroline , William Pitt Cobbett was born on 26 July 1853 in Adelaide, South Australia. Pitt Cobbett was a wine merchant and, after returning to England, in 1864, was an ordained priest. The senior Pitt Cobbett, after filling various curacies, was vicar of the Church of the Holy Rood, Crofton, Hampshire, between 1874 and 1901.
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Abram Grushko
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Abram Borisovich Grushko was a Soviet painter and art teacher that lived and worked in Leningrad. He was a member of the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of Russian Federation and was one of the representatives of the Leningrad school of painting. He was most famous for his many landscape paintings.
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Reidar Aulie
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Reidar Aulie was a Norwegian artist. Biography Reidar Aulie was born in Kristiania , the son of Nils Baltazar Aulie and Martha Valstad . He grew up in a middle-class home in Oslo. Reider Aulie was the younger brother of Andreas Aulie , a lawyer who was the Norwegian attorney general from 1946 until 1967. Aulie graduated in 1927 and traveled to Paris in the autumn with fellow student, Bjarne Ness, who died of tuberculosis just before Christmas that year, only 25 years old. His death made a strong impression on the younger Aulie who had shared lodgings with Ness. Aulie debuted at the Autumn Exhibition in 1927.
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Hugo Magnus
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Hugo Magnus was a German ophthalmologist and historian of medicine. He was of Jewish ancestry. He studied medicine at the University of Breslau, where he was a pupil of Albrecht Theodor Middeldorpf and Hermann Lebert. In 1867 he received his medical doctorate, and in 1873 qualified as a lecturer in ophthalmology. In 1883 he became an associate professor at the University of Breslau.
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John Reed
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
John Harford Reed was an Australian art editor and patron, notable for supporting and collecting of Australian art and culture with his wife Sunday Reed. Biography Early life Reed was born at 'Logan', near Evandale near Launceston, Tasmania, one of six children of wealthy English-born grazier Henry Reed and his wife Lila Borwick, born Dennison in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Reed's youngest sister, Cynthia later married artist and printmaker Sidney Nolan. In 1911 the Reeds left Launceston for England to enhance their children's education. When World War I broke out they returned to Tasmania to settle with John Reed's grandmother at Mount Pleasant, a mansion in Prospect, Tasmania.
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Elizabeth McCausland
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Elizabeth McCausland was an American art critic, historian and writer. Early life Elizabeth McCausland was born in Wichita, Kansas, on April 16, 1899. Career A few years after graduating from Smith College , she began working for Springfield Sunday Union and The Springfield Republican, both newspapers based in Springfield, Massachusetts. She became deeply invested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and eventually compiled a series of articles in a pamphlet called The Blue Menace.
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William Rush
1756 - 1833 (77 years)
William Rush was a U.S. neoclassical sculptor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is considered the first major American sculptor. Early life and education Rush was born in Philadelphia, the fourth child of Joseph Rush, a ship's carpenter, and first wife, Rebecca Lincoln. As a teenager, he apprenticed three years with woodcarver Edward Cutbush, and soon surpassed his master in the art of carving of ships' figureheads in wood.
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Thomas Tommasina
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
Thomas Tommasina was an artist turned physicist who worked on atmospheric ionization and gravitational theories mainly after moving to Switzerland. An experimenter as well as a theoretician, he invented a radio-receiver-like device while studying ionospheric disturbances in the upper atmosphere and used it in long-range weather prediction.
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Johann Georg von Dillis
1759 - 1841 (82 years)
Johann Georg von Dillis was a German painter. Biography He was born in Gmain near Dorfen. Son of a gamekeeper and forester, he was educated in Munich with support from the prince-elector of Bavaria. Initially he was trained for the priesthood, but by 1786 his real interest, art, was beginning to be developed, and he taught drawing both at court and to private families. In 1790 he was appointed inspector of the Hofgarten Galerie, the princely collection.
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Oswald Achenbach
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Oswald Achenbach was a German painter associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Though little known today, during his lifetime he was counted among the most important landscape painters of Europe. Through his teaching activities, he influenced the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His brother, Andreas Achenbach, who was twelve years older, was also among the most important German landscape painters of the 19th century. The two brothers were humorously called "the A and O of Landscapes" .
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Heinrich Maria von Hess
1798 - 1863 (65 years)
Heinrich Maria von Hess was a German painter, a member of the Nazarene movement. Biography Hess was born at Düsseldorf and brought up to the profession of art by his father, the engraver Carl Ernst Christoph Hess. Carl Hess had already acquired a name when in 1806 the elector of Bavaria, having been raised to a kingship by Napoleon, transferred the Düsseldorf academy and gallery to Munich. Carl Hess accompanied the academy to its new home, and there continued the education of his children.
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Cesare Gennari
1637 - 1688 (51 years)
Cesare Gennari was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. His Saint Mary Magdalene is in the Pinacoteca Civica di Cento. His Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Nicholas of Bari is at the Pinacoteca di Bologna.
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Christine Moore Howell
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Christine Moore Howell was a hair care product businesswoman who founded Christine Cosmetics where she formulated her own line of cosmetics and hair care products. She was the head of the New Jersey Board of Beauty Culture Control. She was the first African-American to graduate from Princeton High School.
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Augustin Hirschvogel
1503 - 1553 (50 years)
Augustin Hirschvogel was a German artist, mathematician, and cartographer known primarily for his etchings. His thirty-five small landscape etchings, made between 1545 and 1549, assured him a place in the Danube School, a circle of artists in 16th-century Bavaria and Austria.
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Jane Heap
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner , she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."
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Johann Baptist Drechsler
1756 - 1811 (55 years)
Johann Baptist Drechsler was an Austrian painter of flowers Life Drechsler was born in Vienna in 1766, the son of a porcelain painter. In 1787 he became the first professor of flower-painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where his students included Josef Nigg and Franz Xaver Petter. His style was particularly influenced by the finely detailed work of the Dutch flower-painter Jan van Huysum. He is recorded as working at the Vienna Porcelain Manufactory between 1772 and 1782.
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Duncan McNab McEachran
1841 - 1924 (83 years)
Duncan McNab McEachran as a Canadian veterinarian and academic. Born in Campbeltown, Scotland, the son of David McEachran and Jean Blackney, McEachran graduated from the Edinburgh Veterinary College in 1861 and received his license to practice from Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. In 1862, he emigrated to Canada West, settling in Woodstock. In 1863, he helped set up, along with primary founder Andrew Smith, the Upper Canada Veterinary School . McEachran was a staff member but he considered the admission standards and academic requirements to be inadequate. He left after three years, moving to Montreal.
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Gentile da Fabriano
1370 - 1427 (57 years)
Gentile da Fabriano was an Italian painter known for his participation in the International Gothic painter style. He worked in various places in central Italy, mostly in Tuscany. His best-known works are his Adoration of the Magi from the Strozzi Altarpiece , and the Flight into Egypt. Following a visit to Florence in 1419, he came in contact with humanism, which influenced his work throughout the rest of his career. He became highly influential on other painters in Florence, especially with his detailed representations inspired by his observations of the natural world.
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Franz Steinfeld
1787 - 1868 (81 years)
Franz Steinfeld was an Austrian landscape painter. He is often referred to as "The Younger", to distinguish him from his father, also named Franz , who was a sculptor. Life and work Steifeld was born on 26 March 1787 in Vienna. He initially studied sculpting with his father but, at the suggestion of the engraver, Francesco Vasanova , he was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. There, he studied with Laurenz Janscha, and Albert Christoph Dies. In 1805, he went on a study trip to the Rheinlands and the Netherlands, where he was attracted to the works of Jacob van Ruisdael.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow
1788 - 1862 (74 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow was a German Romantic painter. Biography He was born in Berlin, the second son of the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, who gave him his first lessons in drawing. He then turned to painting, and was instructed by Weitsch.
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Hubert Maurer
1738 - 1818 (80 years)
Hubert Maurer was a German painter, graphic artist and art professor. Life and work He began as a student of the Bavarian court painter, Johann Georg Winter . He continued his education at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where one of his instructors, the mentally unstable sculptor, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, apparently tried to murder him in a fit of paranoia.
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Bertalan Székely
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Bertalan Székely Biography Born into a family that was originally part of the Transylvanian nobility, his father was a court clerk. Although his family wanted him to become an engineer, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna from 1851 to 1855, under Johann Nepomuk Geiger and Carl Rahl. He then returned to his hometown where, for the next three years, he worked as an art teacher. After a year of employment with Count Aichelburg in Marschendorf, he married and moved to Munich, where he studied with Karl von Piloty. It was there that he first developed his interest in history painting. I...
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Anton Melbye
1818 - 1875 (57 years)
Daniel Herman Anton Melbye was a Danish painter and photographer who specialized in maritime scenes. He was the brother of painters Vilhelm and Fritz Melbye. Biography His father was a Royal Customs officer. He had originally planned on a naval career but, because of his myopia, was sent to learn shipbuilding instead. His inclinations for music and art asserted themselves, however, and he left engineering school to learn the guitar. He also wanted to be a marine painter and attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts for a year, in 1838, taking C.W. Eckersberg as his mentor. By 1840, he ...
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Arthur von Ramberg
1819 - 1875 (56 years)
Arthur von Ramberg was an Austrian-born painter who worked in Germany. Biography He was born in Vienna. He studied art at Hanover and early made a tour in Italy, Hungary and Styria. In 1840, he attended the university at Prague, while at the same time uniting the pursuit of art with his other studies. In 1842, he became a pupil at the Art Academy of Dresden under Julius Hübner, and among other early pictures produced his “Wedding of Dwarfs” after Goethe, and “The Emperor Henry I on His Hungarian Campaign.”
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Carl Rahl
1812 - 1865 (53 years)
Carl Rahl, sometimes spelled Karl Rahl , was an Austrian painter. Life Rahl was born in Vienna to Carl Heinrich Rahl , an engraver. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and won a prize at the age of 19. From there he traveled to Munich, Stuttgart, Hungary, and in 1836 to Italy. He remained in Italy from 1836 to 1843, where he in particular studied representatives of the Venetian and Roman schools of art, and painted die Auffindung von Manfreds Leiche .
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Pietro Rotari
1707 - 1762 (55 years)
Pietro Antonio Rotari was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court. His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic. Rotari's works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.
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Paolo Romano
1445 - 1470 (25 years)
Paolo Romano, also known as Paolo Tuccone and as Paolo di Mariano di Tuccio Taccone was an Italian Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith. He was active by 1451, and probably died by 1470. Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects recounts that Paolo Romano was a modest man whose sculpture was far superior to that of his boastful contemporary Mino del Reame.
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Robert Vonnoh
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Robert William Vonnoh was an American Impressionist painter known for his portraits and landscapes. He traveled extensively between the American East Coast and France, more specifically the artists colony Grez-sur-Loing.
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Josiah Warren
1798 - 1874 (76 years)
Josiah Warren was an American utopian socialist, American individualist anarchist, individualist philosopher, polymath, social reformer, inventor, musician, printer and author. He is regarded by anarchist historians like James J. Martin and Peter Marshall among others as the first American anarchist and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first anarchist periodical published, was an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and made his own printing plates.
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Johann Samuel Ersch
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
Johann Samuel Ersch was a German bibliographer, generally regarded as the founder of German bibliography. Biography He was born in Großglogau , in Silesia. In 1785 he entered the University of Halle with the view of studying theology; but soon became more interested in history, bibliography and geography. At Halle he made the acquaintance of Johann Ernst Fabri, professor of geography; and when Fabri was made professor of history and statistics at the University of Jena, Ersch accompanied him there, and helped him in the preparation of several works. In 1788 he published the Verzeichnis aller...
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John Gilbert
1817 - 1897 (80 years)
Sir John Gilbert was an English artist, illustrator and engraver. Biography Gilbert was born in Blackheath, Surrey, and taught himself to paint. His only formal instruction was from George Lance. Skilled in several media, Gilbert gained the nickname, "the Scott of painting". He was best known for the illustrations and wood-engravings he produced for the Illustrated London News. Gilbert was initially apprenticed to a firm of estate agents, but taught himself art by copying prints. He was unable to enter the Royal Academy Schools, but mastered watercolour, oils, and other media. From 1836 he exhibited at the Society of British Artists, and at the RA from 1838.
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Jacques-André Naigeon
1738 - 1810 (72 years)
Jacques-André Naigeon was a French artist, atheist–materialist philosopher, editor and man of letters best known for his contributions to the Encyclopédie and for reworking Baron d'Holbach's and Diderot's manuscripts.
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Christian Frederic Crusé
1794 - 1865 (71 years)
Christian Frederic Crusé was a minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church, born June 27, 1794, in Philadelphia, of Lutheran parentage. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1812, and graduated Jan. 10, 1815, with distinguished honors. He was appointed professor in the University in 1831, and resigned in 1833. He was a teacher for several years at Dr. Muhlenberg's celebrated boys' school on Long Island. He was ordained by bishop White about 1822; became rector of Trinity Parish, Fishkill, N.Y., in April, 1846, but resigned the cure in 1851, and afterwards had no parish. He soon after ...
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Charles Crodel
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Charles Crodel was a German painter and stained glass artist. Life Crodel was born in Marseille, he studied in 1914 with Richard Riemerschmid, one of the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund, at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule and since 1915 at the University of Jena, while he became painter and lithographer. He was a member of the Berlin Secession and of the executive board of the Jena art-union and became a close friend of Gerhard Marcks. In 1923, the German National Gallery of Art at Berlin and later the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris bought first his woodcuts and lithographies. A mural in t...
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Tomioka Tessai
1837 - 1924 (87 years)
Tomioka Tessai was the pseudonym for a painter and calligrapher in imperial Japan. He is regarded as the last major artist in the Bunjinga tradition and one of the first major artists of the Nihonga style. His real name was Yusuke, which he later changed to Hyakuren.
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István Réti
1872 - 1945 (73 years)
István Réti was a Hungarian painter, professor, art historian and leading member, as well as a founder and theoretician, of the Nagybánya artists' colony, located in what is present-day Baia Mare, Romania. In addition, he served as president of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and .
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Liao Chi-chun
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Liao Chi-chun was a Taiwanese painter and sculptor. Education In 1918, he entered the Taiwan Governor-General's National Language School. By 1922, he graduated and began teaching at Fengyuan Public School . In 1924, he was accepted by the Normal Education Division in Painting of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts together with Chen Cheng-po, and received instruction from Tanabe Itaru.
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Robert Pinot
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
Robert Pinot was a French sociologist from the conservative Le Playist school who became a highly effective lobbyist for heavy industry owners. He was the long-term secretary-general of the Comité des forges, an association of iron and steel manufacturers that was influential in setting industrial policy, particularly during World War I .
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