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,
#14101
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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Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger
1805 - 1880 (75 years)
Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger was a Viennese artist. Life Born in Vienna, Geiger wanted originally to follow the family tradition and become a sculptor, but drawing and painting were his natural element. He illustrated Anton Ziegler's Vaterländischen Immortellen of 1839–40. Until 1848, he carried out numerous illustrations of historical works and poetry, but also made oil paintings for the Austrian Royal Family.
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Paolo Riccio
1480 - 1541 (61 years)
Paolo Riccio was a German Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism in the first half of the sixteenth century. He became professor of philosophy in the University of Pavia; subsequently he was physician to Emperor Maximilian I.
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Albert von Keller
1844 - 1920 (76 years)
Albert von Keller was a German painter of Swiss ancestry. He specialized in portraits and indoor scenes. Female figures are a prominent feature of his work. Biography Keller was born in Gais, Switzerland. He was one of eight children born to Caroline Keller, who was divorced at the time of his birth. As was customary, she had resumed the use of her maiden name. Her ex-husband's brother may have been his true father. When he was three, after several moves, the family settled in Bayreuth where he attended primary school and took piano lessons. In 1852, his mother became a citizen of Bavaria and, by extension, so did he.
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Edwin C. Norton
1856 - 1943 (87 years)
Edwin Clarence Norton was an American academic. He was the first dean of Pomona College, where he worked from 1888 to 1926.
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George Ludwig
1922 - 1973 (51 years)
George Döring Ludwig, M.D. was an American Professor and Chairman of medicine and medical researcher, noted for developing the first application of ultrasound to the human body for medical purposes at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, in the late 1940s.
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Adelbert Niemeyer
1867 - 1932 (65 years)
Adelbert Hans Gustav Niemeyer was a German painter, craftsman and architect.
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George E. Morrow
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
George Espy Morrow was an American academic from Ohio. Born into a notable political family, he fought in the Civil War, then attended the University of Michigan Law School. After a decade as a newspaper editor, he became a professor at the Iowa Agricultural College, eventually becoming chair of the College of Agriculture. In 1877, he took a similar position at the University of Illinois College of Agriculture. There, he maintained an experimental field now known as the Morrow Plots, a National Historic Landmark. Morrow was president at the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College from 18...
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Nikolaus Geiger
1849 - 1897 (48 years)
Nikolaus Geiger was a German sculptor and painter. Life Born at Lauingen in the Kingdom of Bavaria, he began an apprenticeship as a stonemason. At the age of 16, he went to Munich, to study with Joseph Knabl at the Academy of Fine Arts. After the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871, he moved to Berlin and after some time achieved recognition for his ornamental work in the . After a visit to Italy he again studied painting in Munich and in 1884 returned to Berlin, where he was awarded a gold medal in 1886, was elected member of the Academy in 1893, and was made professor...
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Joseph DeCamp
1858 - 1923 (65 years)
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was an American painter and educator. Biography Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied with Frank Duveneck. In the second half of the 1870s he went with Duveneck and fellow students to the Royal Academy of Munich. He then spent time in Florence, Italy, returning to Boston in 1883.
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Jakob Wilhelm Roux
1771 - 1831 (60 years)
Jakob Wilhelm Roux was a German painter and draughtsman. Roux was born to a Huguenot family. He studied mathematics for a time at the University of Jena. He later enrolled in the university of Christian Immanuel Oehme where his interests and classes turned to the arts. It was while studying there that he met the surgeon Justus Christian Loder, with whom he collaborated. Roux did a number of anatomical illustrations for Loder. Roux later primarily painted portraits.
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Nikolaos Apostolidis
1856 - 1919 (63 years)
Nikolaos Apostolidis , was a biologist, naturalist, professor, dean, author, and politician. He replaced Iraklis Mitsopoulos as the second director of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens. He served as Dean of the Philosophical School, Rector of the University of Athens, and Minister of Economics. He popularized natural science and was one of the most prolific Greek naturalists of the 20th century. He studied countless species of animals.
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Karl von Blaas
1815 - 1894 (79 years)
Karl von Blaas was an Austrian painter known for his portraits and religious compositions executed on canvas as well as in the form of frescoes. Biography Carl Von Blaas was born to a peasant family at Nauders in the Tyrol on 28 April 1815. He is best known as a history painter and painter of portraits. His first art lessons were in Innsbruck, where he received an education as a writer. But he was more interested in art, and so, like many painters at the time, he aspired to visit Italy to realize his goal of an in-depth art education. His uncle, a judge in Verona, recognized his talent and gave him financial support for study in Venice, which he undertook in 1832.
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Walter Livingston Wright
1872 - 1946 (74 years)
Walter Livingston Wright was an American educator and academic administrator who served as president of Lincoln University from 1936 to 1945. He had been a professor of mathematics at Lincoln since 1893 and served as acting president from 1924 to 1926. His successor was Lincoln's first Black president, Horace Mann Bond.
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Max Hermann Maxy
1895 - 1971 (76 years)
Max Hermann Maxy was a Romanian painter, art professor, scenographer, and professor of German-Jewish descent. Early life and education Maxy was born in Brăila in 1895, into a Jewish family. In 1902, following his mother's early death, he and his family moved to the national capital Bucharest. Between 1913 and 1916, Maxy studied at the School of Fine Arts, where Camil Ressu and Frederic Storck were among his teachers. He fought in World War I, an experience which significantly influenced his painting.
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Eleanor Miller
Eleanor Miller was a teacher and state legislator in California. A Republican, she was the fifth woman elected to the California legislature. She was elected in 1922, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1940. She founded the Eleanor Miller School of Expression. She wrote the memoir When Memory Calls about her life, including her travels to Europe and the Near East. The book includes pen drawings by Lewis D. Johnson.
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