john salt
John Frederick Peto was an American trompe-l'œil ("fool the eye") painter who was long forgotten until his paintings were rediscovered along with those of fellow trompe-l'œil artist William Harnett.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a British writer and poet, translator, philologist, and linguist.
Tolkien wrote many works in the genre of magical fiction. He became world famous for his fantasy books The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).
"The Hobbit" was published in 1937 with drawings by the author and proved so popular that the publisher asked him to write a sequel. The result, 17 years later, was Tolkien's masterpiece, "The Lord of the Rings," which was voted the best book of the 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century, more than 50 million copies had been sold in 30 languages. The film version of "The Lord of the Rings" by New Zealand director Peter Jackson, released in three parts in 2001-2003, broke world viewing records.
Tolkien has been called the "father" of modern high fantasy literature.
John Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He created thousands of works which demonstrate — and, in many cases, combine — the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced that of Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux, and Barbara Kruger among others.
Samuel Johnson was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. He was a devout Anglican, and a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him «arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history». James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson was selected by Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate as «the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature».
Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American statesman and politician, the 40th President of the United States of America (1981-1989).
Martin Lister was a British naturalist and physician.
It could be argued that Lister founded two fields of natural history: arachnology (the study of spiders) and conchology (the study of the shells of organisms). He wrote more than 60 articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, published several volumes on natural history, speculated on the mysterious nature of fossils, and was successful as a physician.
Lister employed his artist daughters to illustrate his books on insects and molluscs - the names of Susanna and Anne appear on the title pages of the volumes. The Lister family published Historiæ Conchyliorum between 1685 and 1692.