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,
#14001
Howard Engstrom
1913 - 1962 (49 years)
Howard T. Engstrom was a Yale University mathematics professor and headed research operations at the United States Navy's Communication Supplementary Activities CSAW during World War II. Along with William Norris and others he founded Engineering Research Associates in 1946. He was one of the co-creators of the Univac computer, and served as deputy director of the National Security Agency.
Go to Profile#14002
Serge Stauffer
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Serge Stauffer was a Swiss artist and art educator. He was one of the co-founders of the F+F Schule für experimentelle Gestaltung in Zurich and known for his German translations of the works of Marcel Duchamp. Stauffer can be considered to have pioneered art as research.
Go to Profile#14003
P. C. Skovgaard
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Peter Christian Thamsen Skovgaard was a Danish national romantic landscape painter. He is one of the main figures associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He is especially known for his large scale portrayals of the Danish landscape.
Go to Profile#14004
Joseph Patrick Slattery
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
Joseph Patrick Slattery, CM was an Irish-born physicist, radiologist, Catholic priest, pioneer in the field of radiography in Australia and credited with the first use of fluoroscopy in Australia. Born in 1866 in Waterford, Ireland, he traveled to Australia as a deacon in 1888, where he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Moran. As a member of the Vincentian Congregation, he and several of his confreres took over the running of St Stanislaus' at Bathurst from the diocesan clergy. Appointed to the position of professor and taught science, including physics and chemistry. Slattery had a keen inte...
Go to Profile#14005
Wu Nanxuan
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Wu Nanxuan , was a Chinese educator and psychologist, best known for his president positions of several prestigious Chinese universities. Biography Wu's original name was Wu Mian , and was born in Yizheng, Jiangsu Province in 1893. Wu finished his high school education in Yangzhou. In 1919, Wu graduated from Fudan University Preparatory School in Shanghai, and left to the United States to continue his study. Wu obtained MA in 1923 and PhD in 1929 both from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Samuel Rosenberg
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Samuel Rosenberg was an American artist and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He showed his work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Academy of Art in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery, and in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was a beloved art teacher, and some of his students were Mel Bochner, Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol.
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Catharine Carter Critcher
1868 - 1964 (96 years)
Catharine Carter Critcher was an American painter. A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body. She was a long time member of the Arts Club of Washington.
Go to Profile#14008
Giacomo Balla
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key proponent of Futurism. In his paintings, he depicted light, movement and speed. He was concerned with expressing movement in his works, but unlike other leading futurists he was not interested in machines or violence with his works tending towards the witty and whimsical.
Go to Profile#14009
Charles Demuth
1883 - 1935 (52 years)
Charles Henry Buckius Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. "Search the history of American art," wrote Ken Johnson in The New York Times, "and you will discover few watercolors more beautiful than those of Charles Demuth. Combining exacting botanical observation and loosely Cubist abstraction, his watercolors of flowers, fruit and vegetables have a magical liveliness and an almost shocking sensuousness."
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Ivan Aivazovsky
1817 - 1900 (83 years)
Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was a Russian-Armenian Romantic painter who is considered one of the greatest masters of marine art. Baptized as Hovhannes Aivazian, he was born into an Armenian family in the Black Sea port of Feodosia in Crimea and was mostly based there.
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Konrad Krzyżanowski
1872 - 1922 (50 years)
Konrad Krzyżanowski was a Polish illustrator and painter, primarily of portraits, who was considered to be an early exponent of Expressionism. Biography He was born in Kremenchuk. He grew up in Kyiv and took his first art lessons at the Kyiv Drawing School with Mykola Murashko. This was followed by studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. He was not there long, however, when his distaste for the school's teaching methods developed into a conflict with the Rector and he was expelled.
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Giovanni Pisano
1248 - 1315 (67 years)
Giovanni Pisano was an Italian sculptor, painter and architect, who worked in the cities of Pisa, Siena and Pistoia. He is best known for his sculpture which shows the influence of both the French Gothic and the Ancient Roman art. Henry Moore, referring to his statues for the facade of Siena Cathedral, called him "the first modern sculptor".
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Paul Henry
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Paul Henry was an Irish artist noted for depicting the West of Ireland landscape in a spare Post-Impressionist style. Biography Henry was born at 61 University Road, Belfast, Ireland, the son of the Rev Robert Mitchell Henry, a Baptist minister , and Kate Ann Berry.
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Pietro Perugino
1448 - 1523 (75 years)
Pietro Perugino , born Pietro Vannucci, was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Umbrian school, who developed some of the qualities that found classic expression in the High Renaissance. Raphael was his most famous pupil.
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Max Schmidt
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
Max Schmidt was a German landscape painter. Biography Schmidt was a native of Berlin, Province of Brandenburg. He studied in the Berlin Art Academy under Carl Joseph Begas and Wilhelm Schirmer. He was largely influenced in his choice of subjects and in his treatment by his familiarity with Egypt and Greece, and paid little heed to German scenes until 1854, but then treated them with rare poetic feeling.
Go to Profile#14016
Clifford Ellis
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
Clifford Wilson Ellis was a British printmaker, painter, designer and art teacher. Ellis is notable both for the work he did for the Recording Britain project during the Second World War and for his role in the development of art teaching.
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John Martyn
1877 - 1984 (107 years)
John A. K. Martyn OBE , was an English schoolmaster, scholar, academic and a distinguished British Himalayan mountaineer. He was the second headmaster of The Doon School. Career In 1935, John Martyn accompanied Arthur Foot to India to establish the teaching staff of The Doon School, a newly opened boarding school for Indian boys.
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Hugh Bryan Nisbet
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Prof Hugh Bryan Nisbet FRIC FRSE CBE DLit was a Scottish chemist who served as the first Principal of Heriot-Watt University. He had a specialist knowledge of petroleum. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 31 March 1902 the son of Robina Currie and Hugh Bryan Nisbet , a clerk. The family lived at 3 Maurice Place, off Blackford Avenue, in south Edinburgh. He attended George Heriot's School then studied science at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc, and continuing as a postgraduate to gain his first doctorate .
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Nicholas Hilliard
1547 - 1619 (72 years)
Nicholas Hilliard was an English goldsmith and limner best known for his portrait miniatures of members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James I of England. He mostly painted small oval miniatures, but also some larger cabinet miniatures, up to about tall, and at least two famous half-length panel portraits of Elizabeth. He enjoyed continuing success as an artist, and continuing financial troubles, for forty-five years. His paintings still exemplify the visual image of Elizabethan England, very different from that of most of Europe in the late sixteenth century. Technically he was very conse...
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Colin Campbell Cooper
1856 - 1937 (81 years)
Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. was an American impressionist painter of architectural paintings, especially of skyscrapers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. An avid traveler, he was also known for his paintings of European and Asian landmarks, as well as natural landscapes, portraits, florals, and interiors. In addition to being a painter, he was also a teacher and writer. His first wife, Emma Lampert Cooper, was also a highly regarded painter.
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Karl Bitter
1867 - 1915 (48 years)
Karl Theodore Francis Bitter was an Austrian-born American sculptor best known for his architectural sculpture, memorials and residential work. Life and career The son of Carl and Henrietta Bitter, he was born in the municipal district Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus of Vienna. His early training took place at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule , and after that at the Kunstakademie . At the Academy, he studied with August Kühne and Edmund Heller. Upon his graduation, he was apprenticed to an architectural sculptor,. This was the period that the Ringstraße was being built in Vienna, and a large number of d...
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Varvara Stepanova
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was a Russian artist. With her husband Alexander Rodchenko, she was associated with the Constructivist branch of the Russian avant-garde, which rejected aesthetic values in favour of revolutionary ones. Her activities extended into propaganda, poetry, stage scenery and textile designs.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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William Heath
1794 - 1840 (46 years)
William Heath was a British artist who once described himself as a "portrait & military painter." He was best known for his published engravings which included caricatures, political cartoons, and commentary on contemporary life.
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Federico Barocci
1535 - 1612 (77 years)
Federico Barocci was an Italian Renaissance painter and printmaker. His original name was Federico Fiori, and he was nicknamed Il Baroccio. His work was highly esteemed and influential, and foreshadows the Baroque of Rubens. He is generally considered the greatest and the most individual painter of his time in central Italy.
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Alonzo Jackman
1809 - 1879 (70 years)
Alonzo Jackman was a Vermont educator and military officer. He is prominent for developing and implementing a system for receiving and training troops for the Union Army during the American Civil War, and for commanding troops on the Vermont border with Canada following the St. Albans Raid.
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Harry Clarke
1889 - 1931 (42 years)
Henry Patrick Clarke RHA was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. His work was influenced by both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. His stained glass was particularly informed by the French Symbolist movement.
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Simone Martini
1284 - 1344 (60 years)
Simone Martini was an Italian painter born in Siena. He was a major figure in the development of early Italian painting and greatly influenced the development of the International Gothic style. It is thought that Martini was a pupil of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the leading Sienese painter of his time. According to late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari, Simone was instead a pupil of Giotto di Bondone, with whom he went to Rome to paint at the Old St. Peter's Basilica, Giotto also executing a mosaic there. Martini's brother-in-law was the artist Lippo Memmi. Very little documentation of Simone's life survives, and many attributions are debated by art historians.
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William Woodward
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
William Woodward was a U.S. artist and educator, best known for his impressionist paintings of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States. Biography Early life William Woodward was born on May 1, 1859, in Seekonk, Massachusetts. His younger brother Ellsworth Woodward also became a notable artist.
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Martin Schongauer
1450 - 1491 (41 years)
Martin Schongauer , also known as Martin Schön or Hübsch Martin by his contemporaries, was an Alsatian engraver and painter. He was the most important printmaker north of the Alps before Albrecht Dürer, a younger artist who collected his work. Schongauer is the first German painter to be a significant engraver, although he seems to have had the family background and training in goldsmithing which was usual for early engravers.
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Parke Kolbe
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Parke Rexford Kolbe was an American author, teacher, administrator, and president of three educational institutions; University of Akron, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and Drexel University.
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Kosta Hakman
1899 - 1961 (62 years)
Kosta Hakman was a Yugoslav and Bosnia and Herzegovina painter. Early life Hakman was born in 1899 in Bosanska Krupa, the third child of local judge Mihailo Hakman, who descended from Polish Catholic immigrants, and Darinka Đurić, a teacher of Bosnian Serb descent from Sarajevo. He had three brothers, Mihailo, Stefan and Nikola and two sisters, Jelena and Zora. He was baptized in the Serbian Orthodox faith.
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Jack Chambers
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
John Richard Chambers was an artist and filmmaker. Born in London, Ontario, Chambers' painting style shifted from surrealist-influenced to photo-realist-influenced. He used the term "Perceptual Realism" and later "perceptualism" to describe his style. He began working with film in the 1960s, completing six by 1970. Stan Brakhage proclaimed Chambers' The Hart of London as "one of the greatest films ever made."
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Ray Boynton
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Ray Boynton also known as Raymond Boynton, was an American artist and arts educator, most famous for his mural work in California during the Great Depression where he earned commissions under the Public Works of Art Project and the Treasury Relief Art Project .
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Robert Franklin Gates
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Robert Franklin Gates was an American muralist, painter, printmaker, and art professor. He was a professor at American University, between 1946 until 1975. In the 1930s, Gates was one of hundreds of artists who benefitted from the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts's distribution of approximately 14,000 art and mural contracts.
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Luigi Russolo
1885 - 1947 (62 years)
Luigi Carlo Filippo Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, builder of experimental musical instruments, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . Russolo completed his secondary education at Seminary of Portograuro in 1901, after which he moved to Milan and began gaining interest in the arts. He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of noise music concerts in 1913–14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori.
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Jacopo de' Barbari
1460 - 1516 (56 years)
Jacopo de' Barbari, sometimes known or referred to as de'Barbari, de Barberi, de Barbari, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo , was an Italian painter, printmaker and miniaturist with a highly individual style. He moved from Venice to Germany in 1500, thus becoming the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe. His few surviving paintings include the first known example of trompe-l'œil since antiquity. His twenty-nine engravings and three very large woodcuts were also highly influential.
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Jim Backus
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
James Gilmore Backus was an American actor. Among his most famous roles were Thurston Howell III on the 1960s sitcom Gilligan's Island, the father of James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause, the voice of the near-sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo, the rich Hubert Updike III on the radio version of The Alan Young Show, and Joan Davis' character's husband on TV's I Married Joan. He also starred in his own show of one season, The Jim Backus Show, also known as Hot Off the Wire.
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Nathaniel Choate
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Nathaniel Choate was an American painter and sculptor who served as vice president of the National Sculpture Society. Choate worked with varied materials, including aluminum, bronze, marble, and onyx. He regularly showcased his work at the National Academy of Design in New York City and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The National Academy of Design elected him an affiliated academician in 1955. In 1961, the Society of Medalists issued their 64th medallion in his honor. Choate also possessed the National Advertising Award from the Outdoor Advertising As...
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Bela Pratt
1867 - 1917 (50 years)
Bela Lyon Pratt was an American sculptor from Connecticut. Life Pratt was born in Norwich, Connecticut, to Sarah and George Pratt, a Yale-educated lawyer. His maternal grandfather, Oramel Whittlesey, was a pianoforte maker and founder in 1835 of Music Vale Seminary in Salem, Connecticut, the first music school in the country authorized to confer degrees to teach music. At 16, Pratt began studying at the Yale University School of Fine Arts, where his teachers included John Henry Niemeyer and John Ferguson Weir .
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Andreas Müller
1811 - 1890 (79 years)
Andreas Johann Jacob Heinrich Müller was a German religious artist; associated with the Düsseldorfer Malerschule. Biography He was the son of a court painter, who, in 1817, became Director of the Grand Ducal gallery in Darmstadt. His younger brother, Karl was also an artist. He received his first art lessons from his father then, in 1833, enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where he studied with Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Peter von Cornelius. The following year, to improve his oil painting techniques, he transferred to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under the direction of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow.
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August Macke
1887 - 1914 (27 years)
August Robert Ludwig Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter . He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him. Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who d...
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Miner Searle Bates
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Miner Searle Bates was an American scholar. Life Bates was educated at numerous prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history; and Hiram College, in Ohio. He worked with YMCA in India and Mesopotamia before finally beginning work at the University of Nanking sponsored by American churches, where he taught history from 1920 to 1950. In 1923 he married Lilliath Robbins, a teacher at nearby Ginling College.
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John Lambrick Vivian
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel John Lambrick Vivian , Inspector of Militia and Her Majesty's Superintendent of Police and Police Magistrate for St Kitts, West Indies, was an English genealogist and historian. He edited editions of the Heraldic Visitations of Devon and of Cornwall, standard reference works for historians of these two counties. Both contain an extensive pedigree of the Vivian family of Devon and Cornwall, produced largely by his own researches.
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Stevenson Macadam
1829 - 1901 (72 years)
Stevenson Macadam was a Scottish scientist, analytical chemist, lecturer, and academic author. He was a founding member of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and a founding member of the Society of Chemical Industry. He was also a President of the Royal Scottish Society of the Arts. He was a prominent lecturer in chemistry at institutions in Edinburgh, including Edinburgh University and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh veterinary colleges. He also had a large analytical chemical consulting practise.
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Edward Blore
1787 - 1879 (92 years)
Edward Blore was a 19th-century English landscape and architectural artist, architect and antiquary. Early career He was born in Derby, the son of the antiquarian writer Thomas Blore. Blore's background was in antiquarian draughtsmanship rather than architecture, in which he had no formal training. Nevertheless, he designed a large palace for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in Alupka, Crimea, and important ecclesiastical furnishings designed by him included organ cases for Winchester Cathedral and Peterborough Cathedral and the choir stalls in Westminster Abbey. Charles Locke Eastl...
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William Hunter
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
William Gordon Hunter, or Bill Hunter, was a statistician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was co-author of the classic book Statistics for Experimenters, and co-founder of the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement with George E. P. Box.
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Franciszek Smuglewicz
1745 - 1807 (62 years)
Franciszek Smuglewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian draughtsman and painter. Smuglewicz is considered a progenitor of Lithuanian art in the modern era. He was precursor of historicism in Polish painting. He was also a founder of Vilnius school of art, his most prominent students were Jan Rustem, Jan Krzysztof Damel, Gaspar Borowski and Józef Oleszkiewicz. His father Łukasz Smuglewicz and brother Antoni were also painters.
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Alexander Nasmyth
1758 - 1840 (82 years)
Alexander Nasmyth was a Scottish portrait and landscape painter, a pupil of Allan Ramsay. He also undertook several architectural commissions. Biography Nasmyth was born in Edinburgh on 9 September 1758. He studied at the Royal High School and the Trustees' Academy and was apprenticed to a coachbuilder. Aged sixteen, he was taken to London by portrait painter Allan Ramsay where he worked on subordinate parts of Ramsay's works. Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh in 1778, where he worked as a portrait painter. Offered a loan by Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, Nasmyth left in 1782 for Italy, where he remained two years furthering his studies.
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George Sotter
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
George W. Sotter was an American painter best known for Impressionist-style works. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but eventually made his name in Philadelphia. He is also known for his work in stained glass, some of which are still installed in numerous churches. In the August 5, 2006 episode of Antiques Roadshow on PBS, filmed in Philadelphia, a Sotter oil painting was appraised at $120,000 to $180,000, much to the delight of its visibly stunned owner. Sotter studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy with artist and teacher Edward Redfield, 1869–1965, member of the regional New Hope group.
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