List of Famous people who died in 1951

Vasiliy Vasilievich Ulrikh was a senior judge of the Soviet Union during most of the regime of Joseph Stalin. Ulrikh served as the presiding judge at many of the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union.

Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.

Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierra was a Spanish military leader who rose to prominence during the July 1936 coup d'état and the subsequent Spanish Civil War and White Terror.

Gertrude Chataway (1866–1951) was the most important child-friend in the life of the author Lewis Carroll, after Alice Liddell. It was Gertrude who inspired his great nonsense mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and the book is dedicated to her, and opens with a poem that uses her name as a double acrostic.

Gideon Oliphant-Murray, 2nd Viscount Elibank was a Scottish colonial administrator, politician and nobleman.

Yoshio Nishina was a Japanese physicist. He was called "the founding father of modern physics research in Japan". He led the efforts of Japan to develop an atomic bomb during World War II.

Anton Durcovici was a Romanian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church and the Bishop of Iaşi from 1947 until his death. Durcovici was a victim of Romania's Communist regime, under which he was imprisoned; he died while in jail. He was known for being a zealous bishop who visited each parish within the confines of his diocese and known for his efforts in preaching the Gospel to all that he could. He likewise was known for his staunch commitment to the values of the Gospel and for his allegiance to the Church which led to his false arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the communist regime. Durcovici was a professor of seminarians and taught his students subjects such as canon law. His zeal as a priest led to his appointment in Bucharest as a rector for seminarians and his renown in Romania led to his episcopal appointment as a bishop.

Joaquín Chapaprieta y Torregrosa was a Spanish politician. He served as Prime Minister in 1935, during the Second Republic.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker was a German-American illustrator. He is considered to be one of the preeminent American illustrators of the early 20th century. He is best known for his poster, book and advertising illustrations, the trade character known as The Arrow Collar Man, and his numerous covers for The Saturday Evening Post. Between 1896 and 1950, Leyendecker painted more than 400 magazine covers. During the Golden Age of American Illustration, for The Saturday Evening Post alone, J. C. Leyendecker produced 322 covers, as well as many advertisement illustrations for its interior pages. No other artist, until the arrival of Norman Rockwell two decades later, was so solidly identified with one publication. Leyendecker "virtually invented the whole idea of modern magazine design."