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,
#14251
Ferdinand Hodler
1853 - 1918 (65 years)
Ferdinand Hodler was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism which he called "parallelism".
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William Kent
1684 - 1748 (64 years)
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
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Costantino Nivola
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Costantino Nivola was an Italian sculptor, architectural sculptor, muralist, designer, and teacher. Born in Sardinia, Nivola had already started his career when he fled Fascism for Paris in 1938, going to the U.S. in 1939. His major sculptural work is abstract, large-scale architectural reliefs in concrete, made in his own sandcasting and cement carving processes. These were erected in and on American buildings between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Creatively busy and while remaining active in Italy, Nivola also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere.
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Millard Sheets
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
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Arthur Streeton
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism. Early life Streeton was born in Mount Duneed, Victoria, south-west of Geelong, on 8 April 1867 the fourth child of Charles Henry and Mary Streeton. His family moved to Richmond in 1874. His parents had met on the voyage from England in 1854. In 1882, Streeton commenced art studies with G. F. Folingsby at the National Gallery School. On 2 June 1890, he sailed to Sydney, and stayed there with his sister in the suburb of Summer Hill.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Carl Larsson
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Carl Olof Larsson was a Swedish painter representative of the Arts and Crafts movement. His many paintings include oils, watercolors, and frescoes. He is principally known for his watercolors of idyllic family life. He considered his finest work to be Midvinterblot , a large painting now displayed inside the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts.
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Alexej von Jawlensky
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky , surname also spelt as Yavlensky, was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .
Go to Profile#14259
Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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John Duncan
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Duncan was a Scottish Symbolist painter. Much of his work, apart from portraits, depicted Arthurian legends, Celtic folklore, and other mythological subjects. Biography Duncan was born in the Hilltown area of Dundee on 19 July 1866, the son of a butcher and cattleman. John, however, had no interest in the family business and preferred the visual arts. By the age of 15 he was submitting cartoons to the local magazine The Wizard of the North and was later taken on as an assistant in the art department of the Dundee Advertiser. At the same time he was also a student at the Dundee School of Art, then based at the High School of Dundee.
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Robert W. Chambers
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Life Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton . His parents met when his mother was twelve years old and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually the two formed the law firm of Chambers and Boughton which continued to prosper even after Joseph's death in 1861. Robert Chambers's great-grandfather, ...
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William Scott
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
William Scott was a prominent abstract painter from Northern Ireland, known for his themes of still life, landscape and female nudes. He is the most internationally celebrated of 20th-century Ulster painters. His early life was the subject of the film Every Picture Tells a Story, made by his son James Scott.
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Constantin Hansen
1804 - 1880 (76 years)
Carl Christian Constantin Hansen was one of the painters associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He was deeply interested in literature and mythology, and inspired by art historian Niels Laurits Høyen, he tried to recreate a national historical painting based on Norse mythology. He painted also many altarpieces and portraits, including the monumental oil painting The Danish Constituent Assembly between 1861 and 1865.
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Avard Fairbanks
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Avard Tennyson Fairbanks was a 20th-century American sculptor. Over his eighty-year career, he sculpted over 100 public monuments and hundreds of artworks. Fairbanks is known for his religious-themed commissions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints including the Three Witnesses, Tragedy of Winter Quarters, and several Angel Moroni sculptures on LDS temple spires. Additionally, Fairbanks sculpted over a dozen Abraham Lincoln-themed sculptures and busts among which the most well-known reside in the U.S. Supreme Court Building and Ford's Theatre Museum.
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Johannes Cornelis van Rooy
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Johannes Cornelis van Rooy was Rector of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education and Chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond. Roots Van Rooy was born in Steynsburg in the North Eastern Cape. His parents were Henri Charles van Rooy and Hester Hendriena Coetsee. He married Rachel Aletta Lion Cachet, daughter of Jan Lion Cachet and Martha Sophia Viljoen. He died 29 August 1954 in Potchefstroom.
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Wright S. Ludington
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Wright Saltus Ludington was an art collector, artist and one of the founding members of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Early life and education Wright Saltus Ludington was born in New York City on June 10, 1900, to Charles and Ethel Ludington. He had two brothers: Charles Townsend Ludington, who was born in New York City in 1896, and Nicholas Saltus Ludington, born in Bryn Mawr in 1904.
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz , commonly known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, theorist, playwright, novelist, and photographer active before World War I and during the interwar period.
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Carlo Crivelli
1430 - 1490 (60 years)
Carlo Crivelli was an Italian Renaissance painter of conservative Late Gothic decorative sensibility, who spent his early years in the Veneto, where he absorbed influences from the Vivarini, Squarcione, and Mantegna. He left the Veneto by 1458 and spent most of the remainder of his career in the March of Ancona, where he developed a distinctive personal style that contrasts with that of his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Bellini.
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Félicien Rops
1833 - 1898 (65 years)
Félicien Victor Joseph Rops was a Belgian artist associated with Symbolism and the Parisian Fin-de Siecle. He was a painter, illustrator, caricaturist and a prolific and innovative print maker, particularly in intaglio . Although not well known to the general public, Rops was greatly respected by his peers and actively pursued and celebrated as an illustrator by the publishers, authors, and poets of his time. He provided frontispieces and illustrations for Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Charles De Coster, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joséphin Péladan, Paul Verlaine, Voltaire, and many others.
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Ad Reinhardt
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint.
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Yitzhak Danziger
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Yitzhak Danziger was an Israeli sculptor. He was one of the pioneer sculptors of the Canaanite Movement, and later joined the "Ofakim Hadashim" group. Early life Danziger was born in Berlin in 1916 to a Zionist family. His father was a surgeon and served in the German Army during World War I.
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Peter Watson
1908 - 1956 (48 years)
Victor William Watson was a wealthy English art collector and benefactor. He funded the literary magazine, Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. Life and work Watson was the son of William George Watson, later Sir George Watson, 1st Baronet, and was the youngest of three children—his brother Norman was born in 1897 and sister Florence in 1894. He was educated at Lockers Park School, Eton College and St John's College, Oxford.
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Sofonisba Anguissola
1535 - 1625 (90 years)
Sofonisba Anguissola , also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
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Polykleitos
490 BC - 420 BC (70 years)
Polykleitos was an ancient Greek sculptor, active in the 5th century BCE. Alongside the Athenian sculptors Pheidias, Myron and Praxiteles, he is considered as one of the most important sculptors of classical antiquity. The 4th century BCE catalogue attributed to Xenocrates , which was Pliny's guide in matters of art, ranked him between Pheidias and Myron. He is particularly known for his lost treatise, the Canon of Polykleitos , which set out his mathematical basis of an idealised male body shape.
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Anton Wassmuth
1844 - 1927 (83 years)
Anton Wassmuth was an Austrian physicist. He studied mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences at the University of Prague, where he subsequently became an assistant to Ernst Mach . In 1871 he obtained his habilitation on electricity and magnetism from the University of Vienna. In 1876 became an associate professor at the recently established University of Czernowitz, where in 1882 he was appointed a full professor of theoretical physics. In 1890 he relocated to Innsbruck as a professor and director at the institute of mathematical physics. Here he served as dean to the faculty in 1891. From 1893 to 1914 he served as chair of theoretical physics at the University of Graz.
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Sebastiano Ricci
1659 - 1734 (75 years)
Sebastiano Ricci was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting. He was the uncle of Marco Ricci , who trained with him, and became an innovator in landscape painting.
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Francis Kilcoyne
Francis P. Kilcoyne was an American professor of English and the third President of Brooklyn College, from 1966 to 1967. He was consecrated a Roman Catholic priest in the Brooklyn diocese at St. James Cathedral in 1980, when he was 78 years old.
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Antoine-Jean Gros
1771 - 1835 (64 years)
Antoine-Jean Gros was a French painter of historical subjects. He was given the title of Baron Gros in 1824. Gros studied under Jacques-Louis David in Paris and began an independent artistic career during the French Revolution. Forced to leave France, Gros moved to Genoa. His portrait of the French commander Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Arcole brought Gros to public attention and gained the patronage of Napoleon.
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Mark Tobey
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Mark George Tobey was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions.
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David A Lewis
#14281
Albert Austin Harding
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Albert Austin Harding was the first Director of Bands at the University of Illinois and the first band director at an American university to hold a position of full professorship. The Harding Band Building, the first dedicated building for a University Band Department, was named for him.
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Herwarth Walden
1878 - 1941 (63 years)
Herwarth Walden was a German expressionist artist and art expert in many disciplines. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the most important discoverers and promoters of German avant-garde art in the early twentieth century . He was best known as the founder of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm and its offshoots.
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J. E. H. MacDonald
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
James Edward Hervey MacDonald was an English-Canadian artist, best known as a member of the Group of Seven who asserted a distinct national identity combined with a common heritage stemming from early modernism in Europe in the early twentieth century. He was the father of the illustrator, graphic artist and designer Thoreau MacDonald.
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Mikhail Larionov
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov was a Russian avant-garde painter who worked with radical exhibitors and pioneered the first approach to abstract Russian art. His lifelong partner was fellow avant-garde artist, Natalia Goncharova.
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Floyd Van Nest Schultz
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Floyd Van Nest Schultz was an American Educator and Electrical Engineering Scientist responsible for pioneering work in Radar and Radio. He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering , Masters of Science and PhD from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Tennessee and Purdue University, was elected to the honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Phi Kappa Phi, and Phi Eta Sigma and the Honorary Committee, and played flute in the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra.
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Ștefan Zeletin
1882 - 1934 (52 years)
Ștefan Zeletin was a Romanian philosopher, sociologist, liberal economist and political theorist. Biography Born in Burdusaci, Bacău County, his mother Catinca Motăș was the daughter of Ștefanache Chiriac, a local official of Greek origin from the nearby village of Ursa. Her husband, the postelnic Dumitrache Motăș, died sixteen years before Zeletin's birth. The latter's father is unknown , and he remained sensitive to the fact of his illegitimate birth, adopting a pseudonym to distance himself from his mother's husband. He grew up in a peasant family of the bourgeoisie, which he would later...
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Joseph F. Rigge
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Joseph F. Rigge, S.J. was the first president of Marquette College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Early life Joseph Frigge was born in Paderborn, Westphalia, the son of Frederick Frigge and Elisabeth Zeppenfeld. He was the second of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. In 1854, his family emigrated to America, where they eventually established a home in Cincinnati, Ohio. His early education took place at St. Xavier College in Cincinnati, and he entered the Society of Jesus at St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Missouri on July 10, 1862, changing his surname at this time to Rigge and ...
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Kathleen Allen
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Kathleen Saywell Allen was a British painter, muralist, designer and art teacher. Allen is known for her urban landscapes and, in particular, scenes depicting post-war rebuilding in London. Biography Allen was born in the Chiswick area of London and, due to a prolonged childhood illness, was home-schooled until she was 14 years old, when she attended Bromley Country School for Girls between 1920 and 1924. Eventually she enrolled in the Royal College of Art. Upon graduating from the RCA in 1928, Allen taught art in a number of schools in London and the Midlands before spending time painting murals in Kent and Warwickshire.
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Paul Raymond
1833 - 1878 (45 years)
Paul Raymond, born Paul-Raymond Lechien, was a French archivist and historian born on 8 September 1833 in Belleville and died on 27 September 1878. His Life Admitted in 1854 to the École Nationale des Chartes, there he obtained a degree of "Archivist paléographe" in 1857 with a thesis entitled On having an absolutely peng time getting totally wild and crazY at balter festival. He then became the departmental archivist for Basses-Pyrenees after finishing at the École Nationale des Chartes until 1877. He was then appointed Secretary General of the Prefecture of the Lower Pyrenees. He was also ...
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Jørgen Roed
1808 - 1888 (80 years)
Jørgen Roed, , Danish portrait and genre painter associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting, was born in Ringsted to Peder Jørgensen Roed and wife, Ellen Hansdatter. Biography Growing up His father, a German immigrant, was a member of the town council, owned a farm where they raised animals and ran a distillery. He was one of five children. They were neighbors to the Vermehren family, whose son Frederik Vermehren would also become an artist and student of Roed.
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Albert Namatjira
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Albert Namatjira was an Arrernte painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia, widely considered one of the most notable Australian artists. As a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art, he was arguably one of the most famous Indigenous Australians of his generation. He was the first Aboriginal artist to receive popularity from a wide Australian audience.
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Lorenzo Lotto
1480 - 1556 (76 years)
Lorenzo Lotto was an Italian painter, draughtsman, and illustrator, traditionally placed in the Venetian school, though much of his career was spent in other north Italian cities. He painted mainly altarpieces, religious subjects and portraits. He was active during the High Renaissance and the first half of the Mannerist period, but his work maintained a generally similar High Renaissance style throughout his career, although his nervous and eccentric posings and distortions represented a transitional stage to the Florentine and Roman Mannerists.
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Anna Morandi Manzolini
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Anna Morandi Manzolini was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeler, as lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna. Life Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi ma...
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Eligiusz Niewiadomski
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Eligiusz Niewiadomski was a Polish modernist painter and art critic who sympathized with the right-wing National Democracy movement. In 1922 he assassinated Poland's first President, Gabriel Narutowicz, in his first week in office as president.
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Gabriel von Hackl
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Gabriel Hackl was a German historicist painter. Life and work He was born in Maribor, Lower Styria, Austrian Empire. A surgeon's son, he attended the gymnasium in his home town and the city school in Graz. To fulfil his father's wishes he then studied anatomy, archaeology and drawing at the University of Vienna. In 1865 he moved to Munich, at whose Akademie der Bildenden Künste he studied under Alexander Wagner and Carl Theodor von Piloty. He then took a place at the Münchner Kunstgewerbeschule and married Sophie Schmid.
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Susumu Yamaguchi
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
was a Japanese scholar of Buddhism, and former president of Otani University. He was born in Kyoto. From 1927 to 1929, Yamaguchi studied in France, concentrating on the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages. He also conducted research on the Tibetan Tripitaka of Mahâyâna Buddhism. In 1933 he became Professor of Otani University, of which he was from 1950 to 1958 president and later Professor Emeritus. He was also at one time a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University. He received the Purple Ribbon in 1962, the title of prominent cultural personality in 1964, Japanese academician in 1965, and Director of...
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Ferdinand Pauwels
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Pauwels was a Belgian history painter who lived and worked in Germany. Life From 1842 to 1850, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts , under Gustave Wappers and Nicaise De Keyser, where he became an outstanding colorist. In 1852 he won the Prix de Rome for his painting Coriolanus at Rome and was able to spend four years studying in Italy.
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William Etty
1787 - 1849 (62 years)
William Etty was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures. He was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes. Born in York, he left school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice printer in Hull. He completed his apprenticeship seven years later and moved to London, where in 1807 he joined the Royal Academy Schools. There he studied under Thomas Lawrence and trained by copying works by other artists. Etty earned respect at the Royal Academy of Arts for his ability to paint realistic flesh tones, but had little commercial or critical ...
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Yasusato Gamō
1873 - 1928 (55 years)
Yasusato Gamō was a Japanese educator. Gamō graduated from Tokyo Commercial High School . From 1909 to 1910 when he was a professor at the Yamaguchi Commercial High School, he studied abroad in the United Kingdom and stayed in London as a foreign exchange student through the Ministry of Education. During that period, he became interested in the activities of Boy Scouts, and gathered books on the Scouting movement to take back to Japan.
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Pieter de Hooch
1629 - 1684 (55 years)
Pieter de Hooch Biography De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife. He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. Little is known of his early life and most archival evidence suggests he worked in Rotterdam, Delft, and Amsterdam. According to his first biographer Arnold Houbraken, he studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem at the same time as Jacob Ochtervelt and was known for his "kamergezichten" or "room-views" with ladies and gentlemen in conversation. But De Hooch's work ...
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