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,
#14701
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
#14712
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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Louis Raemaekers
1869 - 1956 (87 years)
Louis Raemaekers was a Dutch painter, caricaturist and editorial cartoonist for the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf during World War I, noted for his anti-German stance. Early life He was born and grew up in Roermond, Netherlands during a period of political and social unrest in the city, which at that time formed the battleground between Catholic clericalism and liberalism. Louis’ father published a weekly journal called De Volksvriend and was an influential man in liberal circles. His battle against the establishment set the tone for his son's standpoint several decades later, when he fought against the occupation of neutral Belgium at the start of the First World War.
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Edward Bruce
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Edward Bright Bruce was the administrator of the New Deal art projects of the United States Department of the Treasury: the Public Works of Art Project , the Section of Painting and Sculpture , and the Treasury Relief Art Project . Ned Bruce was a successful lawyer and entrepreneur before giving up his business career altogether at the age of 43 to become an artist. However, like most artists during the Depression, he found it impossible to make a living making art, and he grudgingly returned to business as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. In 1932 he joined the Treasury Department, where his ex...
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Charles Eamer Kempe
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Charles Eamer Kempe was a British Victorian era designer and manufacturer of stained glass. His studios produced over 4,000 windows and also designs for altars and altar frontals, furniture and furnishings, lychgates and memorials that helped to define a later nineteenth-century Anglican style. The list of English cathedrals containing examples of his work includes: Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield, Wells, Winchester and York. Kempe's networks of patrons and influence stretched from the Royal Family and the Church of England hierarchy to the literary and artistic beau monde.
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Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876 - 1907 (31 years)
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. She is noted for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art . Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict her...
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Victor Arnautoff
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
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Alexandre Benois
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Alexandre or Alexander Nikolayevich Benois was a Russian artist, art critic, historian, preservationist and founding member of Mir iskusstva , an art movement and magazine. As a designer for the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, Benois exerted what is considered a seminal influence on the modern ballet and stage design.
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William Morris Hunt
1824 - 1879 (55 years)
William Morris Hunt was an American painter. Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a similar group on his return to America. He became Boston's leading portrait and landscape painter, also working as a lithographer and sculptor. In 1871 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Many of his works were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Another disaster was the deterioration of the stone panels in the State Capitol at Albany, New York, on which a number of his murals had been painted.
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Vilhelm Kyhn
1819 - 1903 (84 years)
Peter Vilhelm Carl Kyhn was a Danish landscape painter who belonged to the generation of national romantic painters immediately after the Danish Golden Age and before the Modern Breakthrough. Even though he outlived many of his artistic peers by several decades, he remained a traditionalist and expressed strong criticism of many of the new trends in the painting of his day.
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Mark Veyngerov
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Mark Leonidovich Veyngerov was a Soviet Physicist, USSR State Prize 1946 awardee for papers in the field of Optics. Biography Mark Veyngerov was born in Saint Petersburg in the family of medical doctors: Cecilia Borisovna Brushteyn was a physiotherapist and Leonid Iosifovich Veyngerov was a wide-known balneologist. Leonid Veyngerov was the author of such well-known medical books as Compendium to recipe with a description of the most common drugs that are not included in the Russian pharmacopoeia . He also was the leader of the "Aid Society for Poor Jews" and was the Main Secretary of St. Pe...
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William Thornton
1759 - 1828 (69 years)
William Thornton was an American physician, inventor, painter and architect who designed the United States Capitol. He also served as the first Architect of the Capitol and first Superintendent of the United States Patent Office.
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George Inness
1825 - 1894 (69 years)
George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School at the start of his career. He also studied the Old Masters, and artists of the Barbizon school during later trips to Europe. There he was introduced to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, which was significant for him; he expressed that spiritualism in the works of his maturity .
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Clive Bell
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form. Biography Early life and education Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881, the third of four children of William Heward Bell and Hannah Taylor Cory . He had an elder brother , an elder sister , and a younger sister . His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales – "a family which drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it on the destruction of wild animals."...
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Tadeusz Pruszkowski
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Tadeusz Pruszkowski was a Polish painter and art teacher, known primarily for his portraits. Biography He began his artistic studies in 1904 at the , under Konrad Krzyżanowski. In 1908, he continued his studies in Paris, where he associated with Polish writers and artists belonging to the Royalist Club, a monarchist organization. He also met his future wife there. After graduating, he travelled to Switzerland and Algeria; returning to Poland in 1911 and helping to create an artists' society known as "Young Art" . In 1914, he held his first solo exhibition at the "". In 1915, all the members...
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Pinturicchio
1454 - 1513 (59 years)
Pinturicchio, or Pintoricchio , also known as Benetto di Biagio or Sordicchio, was an Italian painter during the Renaissance. He acquired his nickname because of his small stature and he used it to sign some of his artworks that were created during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Richard Wilson
1713 - 1782 (69 years)
Richard Wilson was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognised as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country". In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work compiled by Paul Spencer-Longhurst is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British...
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LeConte Stewart
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
LeConte Stewart was a Latter-day Saint artist primarily known for his landscapess of rural Utah. His media included oils, watercolors, pastel and charcoal, as well as etchings, linocuts, and lithographs. His home/studio in Kaysville, Utah is on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Scott Burton
1939 - 1989 (50 years)
Scott Burton was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze. Early years Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Burton was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.
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