Rudolph Nureyev

popular name: Robert Mapplethorpe

date_of_death: March 9, 1989

age: 42

cause_of_death: Complications from HIV/AIDS

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.

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: 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.