Tocino
10. Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916) was a Russian mystic with an influence in the later days of Russia’s Romanov dynasty. Rasputin played an important role in the lives of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia coming from Queen Victoria. Rasputin has often been called the Mad Monk or Icha, although the origins of the second name are not known. He was never a monk and made no secret of being married. Some considered him to be a “strannik” (religious pilgrim) or even a starets (“elder”, a title usually reserved for monk-confessors) and believed him to be a psychic and faith healer. He can be considered one of the more controversial characters in 20th century history, although Rasputin is viewed by most historians today as a scapegoat. He played a small but spectacular role in the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.
5. Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1646) was extremely intelligent and at the age of nine was sent to College de Navarre in Paris. In 1602, at age seventeen he began studying theology seriously. In 1606 he was appointed Bishop of Luçon, and in 1622 Pope Gregory made Richelieu a Cardinal. Cardinal Richelieu rose from his provincial post in Luçon to become France’s Secretary of State for foreign affairs in 1616, and then on to head the royal council as prime minister of France in 1624. His powerful, analytical intellect was characterized by a reliance on reason, strong will, the ability to govern others and use political power effectively. Even before becoming Prime Minister, Richelieu’s political views were well-defined. He had a clear idea of how society should function. Everyone played a specific role in the system, making their unique contributions: the clergy through prayer; the nobility with arms under the control of the king, and the common people through obedience. Richelieu believed in the divine right of the king (King Louis XIII), whose role it was to promote peace and order in society.
OZ
1. Ramses II was an Egyptian pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty. At age fourteen, Ramses II was appointed Prince Regent by his father. He is believed to have taken the throne in his early 20s and to have ruled Egypt from 1279 BC to 1213 BC for a total of 66 years and 2 months. He was once said to have lived to be 99 years old, but it is more likely that he died in his 90th or 92nd year. Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus attributed his accomplishments to the semi-mythical Sesostris, and he is traditionally believed to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus due to a tradition started by Eusebius of Caesarea. If he became king in 1279 BC as most Egyptologists today believe, he would have taken the throne on May 31, 1279 BC based on his known accession date of III Shemu day 27.
4. The Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was the most renowned northern European artist of his day, and is now widely recognized as one of the foremost painters in Western art history. By completing the fusion of the realistic tradition of Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of Italian Renaissance painting, he fundamentally revitalized and redirected northern European painting. Rubens’s upbringing mirrored the intense religious strife of his age–a fact that was to be of crucial importance in his artistic career. His father, an ardently Calvinist Antwerp lawyer, fled in 1568 to Germany to escape religious persecution, but after his death (1587) the family moved back to Antwerp, where Peter Paul was raised a Roman Catholic and received his early training as an artist and a courtier. By the age of 21 he was a master painter whose aesthetic and religious outlook led him to look to Italy as the place to complete his education. Upon arriving (1600) in Venice, he fell under the spell of the radiant colour and majestic forms of Titian, whose work had a formative influence on Rubens’s mature style. During Rubens’s 8 years (1600-08) as court painter to the duke of Mantua, he assimilated the lessons of the other Italian Renaissance masters and made (1603) a journey to Spain that had a profound impact on the development of Spanish baroque art. He also spent a considerable amount of time in Rome, where he painted altarpieces for the churches of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme (1602; now in Hopital du Petit-Paris, Grasse, France) and the Chiesa Nuova (1607; now in Musee de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble, France), his first widely acknowledged masterpieces. His reputation established, Rubens returned (1608) to Antwerp following the death of his mother and quickly became the dominant artistic figure in the Spanish Netherlands.
Janus
3. Raphael (1483-1520), Italian painter and architect. He was the youngest of the three giants of the High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di Battista Ciarla; his mother died in 1491. His father was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, a painter “of no great merit.” He was, however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
Sipu
8. Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was a British imperialist and the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (since 1980 known as Zimbabwe), named after himself. He profited greatly from southern Africa’s natural resources. Rhodes was born in Bishop’s Stortford, England, United Kingdom the son of a vicar, and travelled to South Africa as a young man for the benefit of his health. He soon began making a profit from mining the Kimberley diamond mines, and he formed his own company, De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888. On his return to England, he studied at Oriel College, Oxford, but was obliged to return to a better climate and went into politics, becoming a member of the Cape House of Assembly. By 1890 he was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. He also became managing director of the British South Africa Company, which administered a territory roughly equivalent to present-day Zimbabwe. He resigned as Prime Minister in 1896, following the outcry over the “raids” into Transvaal by his friend Dr. Leander Starr Jameson. Although he remained a leading figure in the politics of southern Africa, especially during the Boer War, he was dogged by ill-health throughout his relatively short life. As a result of his will, the Rhodes Scholarships, which enable foreign nationals to study at Oxford, came into being.
6. (1712-1778) As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his prize-winning essay Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts) (1750), in which he decried the harmful effects of modern civilization. Pursuit of the arts and sciences, Rousseau argued, merely promotes idleness, and the resulting political inequality encourages alienation. He continued to explore these themes throughout his career, proposing in Émile, ou l’education (1762) a method of education that would minimize the damage by noticing, encouraging, and following the natural proclivities of the student instead of striving to eliminate them.
John Mackie
7. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) was a German physicist, of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays. Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays was not an accident, nor was he working alone. With the investigations he and his colleagues in various countries were pursuing, the discovery was imminent. In fact, x-rays were produced and a film image recorded at the University of Pennsylvania two years earlier. However, the investigators did not realize the significance of their discovery, filed their film for further reference, and thereby lost the opportunity for recognition of one of the greatest physics discoveries of all time.
FEEG
2. Roger Bacon was a friar living in 13th century England, who, hundreds of years after his death became popularly known as a powerful sorcerer. He is most widely known among scholars as being one of the first people to use experimental methods in alchemy – the root of modern chemistry – and is also known for his application of geometry to the science of lenses, and early experiments in gunpowder. From his writing, and the events in his life, it is possible to see two sides to the man: a remarkably driven experimental scientist compared with his contempories, but also a man heavily influenced by the spiritual side of life reflected in his early leanings towards philosophy and his attachment to the Franciscan order. He was also remarkably outspoken for his day and was often on thin ice with his superiors.
Could 9 be Henri Rousseau? Haven’t seen a formal portrait before but the moustache looks right!
Way ahead of his time, he was.
Obviously it isn’t, but 9 actually has a look of Robert Robinson, who used to present ‘Call My Bluff’ and ‘Ask the Family’ back in the seventies. Anyone know if his grandfather was a Robin or a Richard?
OZ
Liked his food??
Er, Robertson the jam maker? Ross the frozen fish-finger bloke?
OZ
Bit more up market OZ!
Good game Boa. Cheers. 🙂
9. One of the Roux dynasty?
Toc – Aren’t they too recent? That photo looks late Victorian or early Edwardian to me. Perhaps Escoffier or Michelin, something along those lines, although I’ve yet to think of one with a surname or even a first name starting with ‘R’.
Agreed on the ‘good game’. Thanks Boadicea. There must be a lot of time and effort that goes into researching and compiling these.
OZ
Howzit Boa, nice one, well done thanks.
(Even though I arrived late I still played and got my usual score 😉 )
TTF for that! I was beginning to geet frizzy fur and tail droop. Well done, Janus and thanks again Boadicea.
OZ
Good game, good game! More, Miss, please, Miss! 🙂
Thanks for all the Thanks… 🙂
I have to confess that as soon as I saw the announcement, I had Robespierre as one of the subjects. Well done for finding the more obscure characters. Some of them were real goodies.
Boadicea's Chariot 
10. Rasputin
5. Cardinal Richelieu
8. Theodore Roosevelt?
Evenin’ Boadicea and all
1. Ramises II
4. Rubens
OZ
6. Robespierre
3. Raphael, painter
8 Cecil Rhodes. Woo hoo.
7. Roentgen.
Spot on Sipu. 🙂
6 Jean Jaques Rousseau
2 Roger Bacon?
Tocino
10. Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916) was a Russian mystic with an influence in the later days of Russia’s Romanov dynasty. Rasputin played an important role in the lives of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia coming from Queen Victoria. Rasputin has often been called the Mad Monk or Icha, although the origins of the second name are not known. He was never a monk and made no secret of being married. Some considered him to be a “strannik” (religious pilgrim) or even a starets (“elder”, a title usually reserved for monk-confessors) and believed him to be a psychic and faith healer. He can be considered one of the more controversial characters in 20th century history, although Rasputin is viewed by most historians today as a scapegoat. He played a small but spectacular role in the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.
5. Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1646) was extremely intelligent and at the age of nine was sent to College de Navarre in Paris. In 1602, at age seventeen he began studying theology seriously. In 1606 he was appointed Bishop of Luçon, and in 1622 Pope Gregory made Richelieu a Cardinal. Cardinal Richelieu rose from his provincial post in Luçon to become France’s Secretary of State for foreign affairs in 1616, and then on to head the royal council as prime minister of France in 1624. His powerful, analytical intellect was characterized by a reliance on reason, strong will, the ability to govern others and use political power effectively. Even before becoming Prime Minister, Richelieu’s political views were well-defined. He had a clear idea of how society should function. Everyone played a specific role in the system, making their unique contributions: the clergy through prayer; the nobility with arms under the control of the king, and the common people through obedience. Richelieu believed in the divine right of the king (King Louis XIII), whose role it was to promote peace and order in society.
OZ
1. Ramses II was an Egyptian pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty. At age fourteen, Ramses II was appointed Prince Regent by his father. He is believed to have taken the throne in his early 20s and to have ruled Egypt from 1279 BC to 1213 BC for a total of 66 years and 2 months. He was once said to have lived to be 99 years old, but it is more likely that he died in his 90th or 92nd year. Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus attributed his accomplishments to the semi-mythical Sesostris, and he is traditionally believed to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus due to a tradition started by Eusebius of Caesarea. If he became king in 1279 BC as most Egyptologists today believe, he would have taken the throne on May 31, 1279 BC based on his known accession date of III Shemu day 27.
4. The Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was the most renowned northern European artist of his day, and is now widely recognized as one of the foremost painters in Western art history. By completing the fusion of the realistic tradition of Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of Italian Renaissance painting, he fundamentally revitalized and redirected northern European painting. Rubens’s upbringing mirrored the intense religious strife of his age–a fact that was to be of crucial importance in his artistic career. His father, an ardently Calvinist Antwerp lawyer, fled in 1568 to Germany to escape religious persecution, but after his death (1587) the family moved back to Antwerp, where Peter Paul was raised a Roman Catholic and received his early training as an artist and a courtier. By the age of 21 he was a master painter whose aesthetic and religious outlook led him to look to Italy as the place to complete his education. Upon arriving (1600) in Venice, he fell under the spell of the radiant colour and majestic forms of Titian, whose work had a formative influence on Rubens’s mature style. During Rubens’s 8 years (1600-08) as court painter to the duke of Mantua, he assimilated the lessons of the other Italian Renaissance masters and made (1603) a journey to Spain that had a profound impact on the development of Spanish baroque art. He also spent a considerable amount of time in Rome, where he painted altarpieces for the churches of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme (1602; now in Hopital du Petit-Paris, Grasse, France) and the Chiesa Nuova (1607; now in Musee de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble, France), his first widely acknowledged masterpieces. His reputation established, Rubens returned (1608) to Antwerp following the death of his mother and quickly became the dominant artistic figure in the Spanish Netherlands.
Janus
3. Raphael (1483-1520), Italian painter and architect. He was the youngest of the three giants of the High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di Battista Ciarla; his mother died in 1491. His father was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, a painter “of no great merit.” He was, however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
Sipu
8. Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was a British imperialist and the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (since 1980 known as Zimbabwe), named after himself. He profited greatly from southern Africa’s natural resources. Rhodes was born in Bishop’s Stortford, England, United Kingdom the son of a vicar, and travelled to South Africa as a young man for the benefit of his health. He soon began making a profit from mining the Kimberley diamond mines, and he formed his own company, De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888. On his return to England, he studied at Oriel College, Oxford, but was obliged to return to a better climate and went into politics, becoming a member of the Cape House of Assembly. By 1890 he was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. He also became managing director of the British South Africa Company, which administered a territory roughly equivalent to present-day Zimbabwe. He resigned as Prime Minister in 1896, following the outcry over the “raids” into Transvaal by his friend Dr. Leander Starr Jameson. Although he remained a leading figure in the politics of southern Africa, especially during the Boer War, he was dogged by ill-health throughout his relatively short life. As a result of his will, the Rhodes Scholarships, which enable foreign nationals to study at Oxford, came into being.
6. (1712-1778) As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his prize-winning essay Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts) (1750), in which he decried the harmful effects of modern civilization. Pursuit of the arts and sciences, Rousseau argued, merely promotes idleness, and the resulting political inequality encourages alienation. He continued to explore these themes throughout his career, proposing in Émile, ou l’education (1762) a method of education that would minimize the damage by noticing, encouraging, and following the natural proclivities of the student instead of striving to eliminate them.
John Mackie
7. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) was a German physicist, of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays. Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays was not an accident, nor was he working alone. With the investigations he and his colleagues in various countries were pursuing, the discovery was imminent. In fact, x-rays were produced and a film image recorded at the University of Pennsylvania two years earlier. However, the investigators did not realize the significance of their discovery, filed their film for further reference, and thereby lost the opportunity for recognition of one of the greatest physics discoveries of all time.
FEEG
2. Roger Bacon was a friar living in 13th century England, who, hundreds of years after his death became popularly known as a powerful sorcerer. He is most widely known among scholars as being one of the first people to use experimental methods in alchemy – the root of modern chemistry – and is also known for his application of geometry to the science of lenses, and early experiments in gunpowder. From his writing, and the events in his life, it is possible to see two sides to the man: a remarkably driven experimental scientist compared with his contempories, but also a man heavily influenced by the spiritual side of life reflected in his early leanings towards philosophy and his attachment to the Franciscan order. He was also remarkably outspoken for his day and was often on thin ice with his superiors.
Could 9 be Henri Rousseau? Haven’t seen a formal portrait before but the moustache looks right!
Way ahead of his time, he was.
Obviously it isn’t, but 9 actually has a look of Robert Robinson, who used to present ‘Call My Bluff’ and ‘Ask the Family’ back in the seventies. Anyone know if his grandfather was a Robin or a Richard?
OZ
Liked his food??
Er, Robertson the jam maker? Ross the frozen fish-finger bloke?
OZ
Bit more up market OZ!
Good game Boa. Cheers. 🙂
9. One of the Roux dynasty?
Toc – Aren’t they too recent? That photo looks late Victorian or early Edwardian to me. Perhaps Escoffier or Michelin, something along those lines, although I’ve yet to think of one with a surname or even a first name starting with ‘R’.
Agreed on the ‘good game’. Thanks Boadicea. There must be a lot of time and effort that goes into researching and compiling these.
OZ
Howzit Boa, nice one, well done thanks.
(Even though I arrived late I still played and got my usual score 😉 )
9. Ritz
Well done Janus!
9. César Ritz (1850-1918) was a famous Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz, in Paris and The Ritz Hotel in London. His nickname was “king of hoteliers, and hotelier to kings,” and it is from his name and that of his hotels that the term ritzy derives.
TTF for that! I was beginning to geet frizzy fur and tail droop. Well done, Janus and thanks again Boadicea.
OZ
Good game, good game! More, Miss, please, Miss! 🙂
Thanks for all the Thanks… 🙂
I have to confess that as soon as I saw the announcement, I had Robespierre as one of the subjects. Well done for finding the more obscure characters. Some of them were real goodies.