Norman Rockwell

popular name: Bob Ross

date_of_death: July 4, 1995

age: 52

cause_of_death: Complications from lymphoma

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Bob Ross, with his distinctive hair style and quiet demeanor, was a popular American painter, art instructor, and television host. The painter who gave us “happy little trees” was the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States, CBC in Canada, and similar channels in Latin America, and Europe. The show consisted of more than 400 episodes, was as meditative as it was instructive. Ross was a force of pure positivity in a world without a lot of it. Never a picture of health, Bob died at the young age of 52 due to complications from lymphoma caused by long-term smoking and the effects of toxic paint fumes and cleaners.

popular name: Andy Warhol

date_of_death: February 22, 1987

age: 58

cause_of_death: Post-operative cardiac arrhythmia

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol wryly responded to the mass media of the 1960s. His silkscreen-printed paintings of cultural and consumer icons, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes, would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. Before becoming a pop icon, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, moving to New York to pursue a career in commercial illustration. Warhol's illustrations for editorials like Vogue and Glamour during the 1950s led him to financial success. In 1964, Warhol rented a studio loft on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, which was later known as the Factory. Quick to realize the cult of celebrity, the Factory acted as a hub for fashionable movie stars, models, and artists who became fodder for his prints and films, as well as a performance venue for The Velvet Underground. The prolific artist worked across painting, sculpture, and new media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

popular name: George Inness

date_of_death: August 3, 1894

age: 69

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Often called "the father of American landscape painting", George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter during the late 1800s. Although Inness's style evolved through distinct stages over a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned acclaim for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit depth of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither pure realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who intended for his works to combine both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the complete essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating highly ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with sharp and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the physical and the spiritual nature of experience.