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 Education,
#2801
Harold R. W. Benjamin
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was an American educator and writer; known for his publications The Saber-Tooth Curriculum and Higher Education in the American Republics . Biography Early life and education Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was born March 27, 1893, in Gilmanton, Wisconsin, to Harold and Harriet Benjamin. He moved to Oregon with his family in 1904, and graduated from Tualatin Academy in 1910. Benjamin earned degrees from both the Oregon Normal School and the University of Oregon. He later received a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 1927 .
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Tao Xingzhi
1891 - 1946 (55 years)
Tao Xingzhi , was a renowned Chinese educator and reformer in the Republic of China mainland era. He studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and returned to China to champion progressive education. His career in China as a liberal educator was not derivative of John Dewey, as some have alleged, but creative and adaptive. He returned to China at a time when the American influence was zesty and self-confident, and his very name at that time meant "knowledge-action," reflecting the catch-phrase of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming which implied that once knowledge had been o...
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Egerton Ryerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Adolphus Egerton Ryerson was a Canadian educator, author, editor, and Methodist minister who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian public school system. Ryerson is considered to be the founder of the Ontario public school system.
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William Holmes McGuffey
1800 - 1873 (73 years)
William Holmes McGuffey was an American college professor and president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. More than 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
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Fatima Sheikh
1831 - 1900 (69 years)
Fatima Sheikh was an Indian educator and social reformer, who was a colleague of the social reformers Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule She is widely considered to be India’s first Muslim woman teacher.
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August Hermann Niemeyer
1754 - 1828 (74 years)
August Hermann Niemeyer was a German Protestant theologian, teacher, a librettist, a poet, a travel writer, a Protestant church song poet and a Prussian political educator. He was professor of theology in 1780, then vice-chancellor of the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
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Millicent Mackenzie
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Millicent Hughes Mackenzie was a British professor of education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, the first female professor in Wales and the first appointed to a fully chartered university in the United Kingdom. She wrote on the philosophy of education, founded the Cardiff Suffragette branch, became the only woman candidate in Wales in the 1918 general election, and was a key initiator of Steiner-Waldorf education in the United Kingdom.
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Charles Eliot Norton
1827 - 1908 (81 years)
Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom.
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Mark Hopkins
1802 - 1887 (85 years)
Mark Hopkins was an American educator and Congregationalist theologian, president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872. An epigram — widely attributed to President James A. Garfield, a student of Hopkins — defined an ideal college as "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other."
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Vir Singh
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Bhai Vir Singh was an Indian poet, scholar, and theologian of the Sikh revival movement, playing an important part in the renewal of Punjabi literary tradition. Singh's contributions were so important and influential that he became canonized as Bhai, an honorific often given to those who could be considered a saint of the Sikh faith.
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Edmond Pottier
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Edmond François Paul Pottier was an art historian and archaeologist who was instrumental in establishing the Corpus vasorum antiquorum. He was a pioneering scholar in the study of Ancient Greek pottery.
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Mildred H. McAfee
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Mildred Helen McAfee Horton was an American academic, educator, naval officer, and religious leader. She served during World War II as first director of the WAVES in the United States Navy. She was the first woman commissioned in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the first woman to receive the Navy Distinguished Service Medal.
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May Hill Arbuthnot
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
May Hill Arbuthnot was an American educator, editor, writer, and critic who devoted her career to the awareness and importance of children's literature. Her efforts expanded and enriched the selection of books for children, libraries, and children's librarians alike. She was selected for American Libraries article “100 Most Important Leaders we had for the 20th Century”.
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Arnold Hauser
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Arnold Hauser was a Hungarian-German art historian and sociologist who was perhaps the leading Marxist in the field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art. Life and Main Works Hauser studied history of art and literature in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Among his teachers were Max Dvořák in Vienna, Georg Simmel in Berlin, Henri Bergson and Gustave Lanson in Paris. After World War I he spent two years in Italy, familiarizing himself with Italian art. In 1921, he moved to Berlin, and in 1924 to Vienna. By that time he had concluded, in his own words, that “the pr...
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Adrian Prakhov
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Adrian Victorovich Prakhov was a Russian art critic, archaeologist and art historian. Biography In 1863, he entered Saint Petersburg University, where he studied history and philology. After graduating in 1867, he was sent abroad for further studies, in preparation for employment with the department of art history.
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Rodolfo Amando Philippi
1808 - 1904 (96 years)
Rodolfo Amando Philippi was a German–Chilean paleontologist and zoologist. Philippi contributed primarily to malacology and paleontology. His grandson, Rodulfo Amando Philippi Bañados , was also a zoologist and in order to avoid confusion in zoological nomenclature, the elder is referred to as "Philippi [Krumwiede]" to distinguish him from his grandson "Philippi [Bañados]".
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Patrick Francis Healy
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Patrick Francis Healy was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was an influential president of Georgetown University, becoming known as its "second founder". The university's flagship building, Healy Hall, bears his name. Though he considered himself and was largely accepted as White, Healy was posthumously recognized as the first Black American to become a Jesuit, to earn a PhD, and to become the president of a predominantly White university.
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Max Dvořák
1874 - 1921 (47 years)
Max Dvořák was a Czech-born Austrian art historian. He was a professor of art history at the University of Vienna and a famous member of the Vienna School of Art History, employing a Geistesgeschichte methodology.
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Charles B. Glenn
1871 - 1967 (96 years)
Charles Bowles Glenn was an American educator who served as superintendent of the Birmingham, Alabama school district from 1921 to 1942, and was president of the National Education Association from 1937 through 1938. Glenn was one of the earliest proponents and implementors of character education in schools, and he is the namesake of Charles B. Glenn Middle School—formerly Charles B. Glenn Vocational High School—in Birmingham.
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Carl Peter Thunberg
1743 - 1828 (85 years)
Carl Peter Thunberg, also known as Karl Peter von Thunberg, Carl Pehr Thunberg, or Carl Per Thunberg , was a Swedish naturalist and an "apostle" of Carl Linnaeus. After studying under Linnaeus at Uppsala University, he spent seven years travelling in southern Italy and Asia, collecting and describing people and animals new to European science, and observing local cultures. He has been called "the father of South African botany", "pioneer of Occidental Medicine in Japan", and the "Japanese Linnaeus".
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Nikolay Punin
1888 - 1953 (65 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Punin was a Russian art scholar and writer. He edited several magazines, such as Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo among others, and was also co-founder of the Department of Iconography in the State Russian Museum. Punin was a lifelong friend and common-law husband of poet Anna Akhmatova who is famous for writing the poem Requiem.
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James H. Dillard
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
James Hardy Dillard , also known as J. H. Dillard, was an educator from Virginia. The son of slaveholders, Dillard was educated at Washington and Lee University and held a variety of teaching positions. In 1891, Dillard was named a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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Marta Traba
1930 - 1983 (53 years)
Marta Traba Taín was an art critic and writer known for her contributions to Latin American art and literature. Biography Traba's parents were Catalan immigrants, Francisco Traba and Marta Taín. She studied Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Upon graduation she worked at the arts review journal Ver y Estimar , under the editorship of the art critic Jorge Romero Brest.
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Susan Tolman Mills
1826 - 1912 (86 years)
Susan Tolman Mills was the co-founder of Mills College . Background Mills was born on November 18, 1826, in Enosburgh, Vermont. She was one of eight children of John Tolman and Elizabeth Tolman. Her family moved to Ware, Massachusetts by 1836, where her father and brothers expanded the family's tannery business. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1845.
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Giovanni Canestrini
1835 - 1900 (65 years)
Giovanni Canestrini was an Italian naturalist and biologist and translator who was a native of Revò. Career He initially studied in Gorizia and Meran, then furthered his education in natural sciences at the University of Vienna. From 1862 to 1869, he was a lecturer at the University of Modena, and in 1869 became a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Padua.
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Paul Frankl
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Paul Frankl was an art historian born in Austria-Hungary. Frankl is most known for his writings on the history and principles of architecture, which he famously presented within a Gestalt-oriented framework.
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Vittorino da Feltre
1378 - 1446 (68 years)
Vittorino da Feltre was an Italian humanist and teacher. He was born in Feltre, Belluno, Republic of Venice and died in Mantua. His real name was Vittorino Rambaldoni. It was in Vittorino that the Renaissance idea of the complete man, or l'uomo universale — health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind — reached its first formulation.
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William Henry Hadow
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Sir William Henry Hadow was a leading educational reformer in Great Britain, a musicologist and a composer. Life Born at Ebrington in Gloucestershire and baptised there on 29 January 1860 by his father, he was the eldest child of the Reverend William Elliot Hadow and his wife Mary Lang Cornish . His grandfather, the Reverend William Thomas Hadow, had married Eleanor Ann Bethune, daughter of Colonel John Drinkwater Bethune.
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Gisela Richter
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Gisela Marie Augusta Richter was a British-American classical archaeologist and art historian. She was a prominent figure and an authority in her field. Early life Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter. Both of her parents and her sister, Irma, were art historians specialised in Italian Renaissance. Richter was educated at Maida Vale School, one of the finest schools for women at the time. She decided to become a classical archaeologist while attending Emmanuel Loewy's lectures at the University of Rome around 1896. In 1901, she began attending Girton College at the University of Cambridge.
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Huberto Rohden
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Huberto Rohden Sobrinho, known as Huberto Rohden, was a Brazilian philosopher, educator and theologist. He was born in São Ludgero. A pioneer of transcendentalism in Brazil who wrote more than 100 works, where he taught ecumenical lecture of spiritual approach towards Education, Philosophy, Science, emphasizing self-knowledge.
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Paul Zarifopol
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Paul Zarifopol was a Romanian literary and social critic, essayist, and literary historian. The scion of an aristocratic family, formally trained in both philology and the sociology of literature, he emerged in the 1910s as a rebel, highly distinctive, voice among the Romanian press and book reviewers. He was a confidant and publisher of the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, building his theories on Caragiale's already trenchant appraisals of Romanian society and culture. Zarifopol defended art for art's sake even against the Marxism of his father-in-law, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, and the Poporanism of his friend, Garabet Ibrăileanu.
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William Burns Paterson
1850 - 1915 (65 years)
William Burns Paterson was an educator and horticulturist. He is chiefly known as an educational provider, being involved in establishing Alabama State University. He was a Democrat, a Presbyterian, and a charter member of the Alabama State horticultural society.
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Sayyid Qutb
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic scholar, theorist, revolutionary, poet, and a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed by hanging. He is considered as "the Father of Salafi jihadism", the religio-political doctrine that underpins the ideological roots of global jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIL.
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Walter Coffey
1876 - 1976 (100 years)
Walter Coffey was the seventh president of the University of Minnesota, serving from 1941 to 1945. Early years Walter Coffey was raised in Hartsville, Indiana and worked with his father as a sheep herder where he began to grow a strong interest in animal husbandry.
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John E. Jacobs
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
John Earl Jacobs was an American educator most notably for serving as an administrator at what is now known as Emporia State University. Before serving as the Kansas State Teachers College interim president of, Jacobs was the Supervisor of Secondary Education at KSTC and served as principal of a couple of high schools before coming to Emporia.
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Irma Salas Silva
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Irma Salas Silva was a distinguished Chilean educator. She was the first Chilean woman to earn a doctorate in education, obtained at Columbia University in 1930. Biography Irma Salas was born in Santiago on 11 March 1903, the daughter of educator and Luisa Silva Molina. She followed in her father's footsteps, becoming a noted academic administrator. She was also an advocate for women's rights and education.
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Booker T. Washington
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite. Washington was from the last generation of Black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centu...
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Horace Walpole
1717 - 1797 (80 years)
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford , better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician. He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London, reviving the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. His literary reputation rests on the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto , and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. They have been published by Yale University Press in 48 volumes. In 2017, a volume of Walpole's selected letters was published.
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Rudolf Wittkower
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Rudolf Wittkower was a British art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, who spent much of his career in London, but was educated in Germany, and later moved to the United States. Despite having a British father who stayed in Germany after his studies, he was born and raised in Berlin.
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Josephine Turpin Washington
1861 - 1949 (88 years)
Josephine Turpin Washington was an African-American writer and teacher. A long-time educator and a frequent contributor, Washington devised articles to magazines and newspapers typically concerning some aspect of racism in America. Washington was a great-granddaughter of Mary Jefferson Turpin, a paternal aunt of Thomas Jefferson.
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Maikki Friberg
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Maria Elisabeth Friberg was a Finnish educator, journal editor, suffragist and peace activist. She is remembered for her involvement in the Finnish women's movement, especially as chair of the Finnish women's rights organisation Suomen Naisyhdistys and as the founder and editor of the women's journal Naisten Ääni . She travelled widely, promoting understanding of Finland abroad while participating in international conferences and contributing to the foreign press.
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Taki Fujita
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Taki Fujita was a Japanese educator and activist for women's rights. Fujita was president of Tsuda College from 1962 to 1972. Early life and education Fujita was born in Nagoya, and raised in Okinawa and Osaka, the daughter of a judge, Fujita Kikue, and Fujita Kameki. Her parents were Christian and she was baptized as an infant; as an adult she was drawn to the Quaker tradition. She attended Tsuda College beginning in 1916, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1925. She returned to the United States in 1935 for further study at Smith College.
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Victor Della-Vos
1829 - 1890 (61 years)
Victor Karlovich Della-Vos was a Russian educationalist and proponent of manual training. Della-Vos graduated from Moscow University in 1853 with a degree in physical and mathematical sciences and soon embarked on his teaching career. In 1858 he went to Paris to study machine tool manufacture. After also visiting London where he studied agricultural machinery he returned to Russia in 1864 to take up the post of professor of mechanics at the Petrovsky Academy. By 1868 he was appointed director of the Moscow Imperial Technical Academy. He became widely known for his combination of both theoreti...
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Emma Elizabeth Johnson
1863 - Present (163 years)
Emma Elizabeth Johnson was an American educator who served as president of Johnson Bible College , in Knoxville, Tennessee, from 1925 until her death. She was the first American woman to serve as president of a co-educational university.
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André Grabar
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
André Nicolaevitch Grabar was a historian of Romanesque art and the art of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Bulgarian Empire. Born and educated in Kiev, Saint Petersburg and Odessa, he spent his career in Bulgaria , France and the United States , and wrote all his papers in French. Grabar was one of the 20th-century founders of the study of the art and icons of the Eastern Roman Empire, adopting a synthetic approach embracing history, theology and interactions with the Islamic world.
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Cees P. M. Van Der Vleuten
#2847
Karl Georg von Raumer
1783 - 1865 (82 years)
Karl Georg von Raumer was a German geologist and educator. Biography Raumer was born in Wörlitz, in Anhalt-Dessau. He was educated at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, and at the mining academy in Freiberg as a student of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1811 he became professor of mineralogy at Breslau, and two years later, participated in the German Campaign of 1813. In 1819 he relocated as a professor to the University of Halle, then in 1827 settled at the University of Erlangen as a professor of natural history and mineralogy. Raumer died in Erlangen.
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Leonard Horner
1785 - 1864 (79 years)
Leonard Horner FRSE FRS FGS was a Scottish merchant, geologist and educational reformer. He was the younger brother of Francis Horner. Horner was a founder of the School of Arts of Edinburgh, now Heriot-Watt University and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Academy. A 'radical educational reformer' he was involved in the establishment of University College School. As a commissioner on the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children in Factories, Horner arguably did more to improve the working conditions of women and children in North England than any other person in the 19th century.
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Andrej Dudrovich
1782 - 1830 (48 years)
Andrej Dudrovich was a Russian philosopher, professor and president of Kharkov University during the Age of Enlightenment. Biography Andrej Dudrovich was born in Serbia, then part of the Austrian Empire before emigrating to Imperial Russia. Like many intellectuals of his generation who received an education abroad, he became influenced by Immanuel Kant's moral teachings. His chief work was a doctoral dissertation dealing with Kant while in the class of Johann Baptist Schad, a Benedictine monk who converted to Protestanism and became one of Kant's disciples in Imperial Russia. Dudrovich was a...
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Antoine-Fortuné Marion
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
Antoine-Fortuné Marion was a French naturalist with interests in geology, zoology, and botany. He was also a competent amateur painter. A school friend of Paul Cézanne's in Aix-en-Provence, Marion went on to become professor and director of the Natural History Museum in Marseille. Cézanne painted his portrait in 1866–1867 at the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan.
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