Wedgwood
Josiah Wedgwood and Sons known as Wedgwood, is a fine china and luxury accessories company founded on 1 May 1759 by English potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. In 1987, Wedgwood merged with Waterford Crystal to create Waterford Wedgwood, an Ireland-based luxury brands group; the main assets of Waterford Wedgwood were purchased in 2009 by KPS Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, the group became known as WWRD Holdings Limited, an abbreviation for "Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton". In July 2015, it was acquired by a Finnish consumer goods company. At the outset, Josiah Wedgwood worked with the established potter Thomas Whieldon until 1759, when relatives leased him the Ivy House in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, which allowed him to start his own pottery business, his marriage to Sarah Wedgwood, a distant cousin with a sizable dowry, helped him launch his new venture. In 1765, Wedgwood created a new form of creamware, a fine glazed earthenware, which impressed the British Queen consort Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who gave official permission to call it "Queen's Ware".
This new form sold well across Europe. In 1766, Wedgwood bought a large Staffordshire estate, as both a home and factory site. Wedgwood developed a number of further industrial innovations for his company, notably a way of measuring kiln temperatures and new ceramic bodies including Black Basalt and Jasperware, both unglazed stonewares. Wedgwood's best known product is Jasperware, created to look like ancient cameo glass, it was inspired by the Portland Vase, a Roman vessel, now a museum piece. The first jasperware colour was Portland Blue, an innovation that required experiments with more than 3,000 samples. In recognition of the importance of his pyrometric beads, Josiah Wedgwood was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1783; the Wedgwood Prestige collection sold replicas of the original designs, as well as modern neo-classical style jasperware. The main Wedgwood motifs in jasperware – as well as in other wares like basaltware, caneware, etc. – were decorative designs that were influenced by the ancient cultures being studied and rediscovered at that time as Great Britain was expanding its empire.
Many motifs were taken from ancient mythologies: Roman and Egyptian. Meanwhile, archaeological fever caught the imagination of many artists. Nothing could have been more suitable to satisfy this huge business demand than to produce replicas of ancient artefacts. Many representations of royalty and statesmen in silhouette were created, as well as political symbols; these were set in jewellery, as well as in architectural features like fireplace mantels and furniture. Wedgwood has honoured American individuals and corporations as well and recently. In 1774 he employed the 19-year-old John Flaxman as an artist, who would work for the next 12 years for Wedgwood; the "Dancing Hours" may be his most well known design. Other artists known to have worked for Wedgwood include among others Lady Elizabeth Templetown, George Stubbs, Emma Crewe and Lady Diana Beauclerk. Wedgwood had increasing success with hard paste porcelain which attempted to imitate the whiteness of tea-ware imported from China, an popular product amongst high society.
High transport costs and the demanding journey from the Far East meant that the supply of chinaware could not keep up with high demand. Towards the end of the 18th century other Staffordshire manufacturers introduced bone china as an alternative to translucent and delicate Chinese porcelain. In 1812 Wedgwood produced their own bone china which, though not a commercial success at first became an important part of an profitable business. Josiah Wedgwood was a patriarch of the Darwin–Wedgwood family. Many of his descendants were involved in the management of the company down to the time of the merger with the Waterford Company: John Wedgwood, eldest son of Josiah I, was a partner in the firm from 1790 to 1793 and again from 1800 to 1812. Josiah Wedgwood II, second son of Josiah I, succeeded his father as proprietor in 1795 and introduced the production by the Wedgwood company of bone china. In 1815, during Josiah II's time as proprietor, the great English Romantic poet William Blake spent time engraving for Wedgwood's china catalogues.
Josiah Wedgwood III, son of Josiah II, was a partner in the firm from 1825 until he retired in 1842. Francis Wedgwood, son of Josiah II, was a partner in the firm from 1827 and sole proprietor following his father's death until joined by his own sons. Financial difficulties caused him to offer for sale soon after taking over the firm its factory at Etruria and the family home Etruria Hall, but only the hall was sold, he continued as senior partner until his retirement to Barlaston Hall in 1876. Godfrey Wedgwood, son of Francis Wedgwood, was a partner in the firm from 1859 to 1891, he and his brothers were responsible for the reintroduction of bone china c.1876 and the employment of the artists Thomas Allen and Emile Lessore. Clement Wedgwood, son of Francis Wedgwood, was a partner. Laurence Wedgwood, son of Francis Wedgwood, was a partner. Major Cecil Wedgwood DSO, son of Godfrey Wedgwood, partner from 1884, first Mayor of the federated County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent, was chairman and managing director of Wedgwood until his death in battle in 1916.
Kennard Laurence Wedgwood, son of Laurence Wedgwood, was a partner. In 1906 he went to the United States and set up the firm's New York office, which became Josiah Wedgwood and Sons USA, an incorporated subsidiary, in 1919. Francis Ham
John Flaxman
John Flaxman R. A. was a British sculptor and draughtsman, a leading figure in British and European Neoclassicism. Early in his career he worked as a modeller for Josiah Wedgwood's pottery, he spent several years in Rome. He was a prolific maker of funerary monuments, he was born in York. His father named John, was well known as a moulder and seller of plaster casts at the sign of the Golden Head, New Street, Covent Garden, London, his wife's maiden name was Lee, they had two children and John. Within six months of John's birth the family returned to London, he was a sickly child, high-shouldered, with a head too large for his body. His mother died when he was nine, his father remarried, he had little schooling, was self-educated. He took delight in drawing and modelling from his father's stock-in-trade, studied translations from classical literature in an effort to understand them, his father's customers helped him with books and with commissions. Significant were the painter George Romney, a cultivated clergyman, Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Mrs. Mathew, in whose house in Rathbone Place the young Flaxman used to meet the best "blue-stocking" society of the day and, among those his own age, the artists William Blake and Thomas Stothard, who became his closest friends.
At the age of 12 he won the first prize of the Society of Arts for a medallion, exhibited in the gallery of the Free Society of Artists. In the same year, 1770, he won the silver medal. In the competition for the gold medal of the Academy in 1772, Flaxman was defeated, the prize being awarded by the president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, to a competitor named Engleheart; this episode seemed to help cure Flaxman of a tendency to conceit which led Thomas Wedgwood V to say of him in 1775, "It is but a few years since he was a most supreme coxcomb."He continued to work diligently, both as a student and as an exhibitor at the Academy, with occasional attempts at painting. To the Academy he contributed a wax model of Neptune. During this period he received a commission from a friend of the Mathew family for a statue of Alexander the Great, but he was unable to obtain a regular income from private contracts. From 1775 he was employed by the potter Josiah Wedgwood and his partner Bentley, for whom his father had done some work, modelling reliefs for use on the company's jasperware and basaltware.
The usual procedure was to model the reliefs in wax on slate or glass grounds before they cast for production. D'Hancarville's engravings of Sir William Hamilton's collection of ancient Greek vases were an important influence on his work, his designs included the Apotheosis of Homer used for a vase. By 1780 Flaxman had begun to earn money by sculpting grave monuments, his early memorials included those to Thomas Chatterton in the church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, Mrs Morley in Gloucester Cathedral, the Rev. Thomas and Mrs Margaret Ball in Chichester Cathedral.. During the rest of Flaxman's career memorial bas-reliefs of this type made up the bulk of his output, are to be found in many churches throughout England. One example, the monument to George Steevens in St Matthais Old Church, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, his best monumental work was admired for its pathos and simplicity, for the combination of a Greek instinct for rhythmical design and composition with a spirit of domestic tenderness and innocence.
In 1782, aged 27, Flaxman married Anne Denman, to assist him throughout his career. She was well-educated, a devoted companion, they set up house in Wardour Street, spent their summer holidays as guests of the poet William Hayley, at Eartham in Sussex. In 1787, five years after their marriage and his wife set off for Rome, on a journey funded by Wedgwood, his activities in the city included supervising a group of modellers employed by Wedgwood, although he no longer made any work for the potter himself. His sketchbooks show that while there he studied not only Classical, but Medieval and Renaissance art. While in Rome he produced the first of the book illustrations for which he was to become famous, which promoted his influence all over Europe, leading Goethe to describe him as "the idol of all dilettanti", his designs for the works of Homer were commissioned by Georgiana Hare-Naylor. All were engraved by Piroli. Flaxman created one hundred and eleven illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy which served as an inspiration for such artists as Goya and Ingres, were used as an academic source for 19th-century art students.
He had intended to stay in Italy for little more than two years, but was detained by a commission for a marble group of the Fury of Athamas for Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, which proved troublesome. By the time of his return to England in the summer of 1794, after an absence of seven years, he had executed Cephalus and Aurora, a group in marble based on a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses; this was bought by Thomas Hope, who arrived in Rome i
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south and is bounded by Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east. At 165,250,000 square kilometers in area, this largest division of the World Ocean—and, in turn, the hydrosphere—covers about 46% of Earth's water surface and about one-third of its total surface area, making it larger than all of Earth's land area combined; the centers of both the Water Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere are in the Pacific Ocean. The equator subdivides it into the North Pacific Ocean and South Pacific Ocean, with two exceptions: the Galápagos and Gilbert Islands, while straddling the equator, are deemed wholly within the South Pacific, its mean depth is 4,000 meters. The Mariana Trench in the western North Pacific is the deepest point in the world, reaching a depth of 10,911 meters; the western Pacific has many peripheral seas. Though the peoples of Asia and Oceania have traveled the Pacific Ocean since prehistoric times, the eastern Pacific was first sighted by Europeans in the early 16th century when Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great "southern sea" which he named Mar del Sur.
The ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in both Portuguese and Spanish means "peaceful sea". Important human migrations occurred in the Pacific in prehistoric times. About 3000 BC, the Austronesian peoples on the island of Taiwan mastered the art of long-distance canoe travel and spread themselves and their languages south to the Philippines and maritime Southeast Asia. Long-distance trade developed all along the coast from Mozambique to Japan. Trade, therefore knowledge, extended to the Indonesian islands but not Australia. By at least 878 when there was a significant Islamic settlement in Canton much of this trade was controlled by Arabs or Muslims. In 219 BC Xu Fu sailed out into the Pacific searching for the elixir of immortality. From 1404 to 1433 Zheng He led expeditions into the Indian Ocean; the first contact of European navigators with the western edge of the Pacific Ocean was made by the Portuguese expeditions of António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão, via the Lesser Sunda Islands, to the Maluku Islands, in 1512, with Jorge Álvares's expedition to southern China in 1513, both ordered by Afonso de Albuquerque from Malacca.
The east side of the ocean was discovered by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513 after his expedition crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached a new ocean. He named it Mar del Sur because the ocean was to the south of the coast of the isthmus where he first observed the Pacific. In 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed the Pacific East to West on a Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands that would result in the first world circumnavigation. Magellan called the ocean Pacífico because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters; the ocean was called the Sea of Magellan in his honor until the eighteenth century. Although Magellan himself died in the Philippines in 1521, Spanish Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano led the remains of the expedition back to Spain across the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope, completing the first world circumnavigation in a single expedition in 1522. Sailing around and east of the Moluccas, between 1525 and 1527, Portuguese expeditions discovered the Caroline Islands, the Aru Islands, Papua New Guinea.
In 1542–43 the Portuguese reached Japan. In 1564, five Spanish ships carrying 379 explorers crossed the ocean from Mexico led by Miguel López de Legazpi, sailed to the Philippines and Mariana Islands. For the remainder of the 16th century, Spanish influence was paramount, with ships sailing from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines via Guam, establishing the Spanish East Indies; the Manila galleons operated for two and a half centuries, linking Manila and Acapulco, in one of the longest trade routes in history. Spanish expeditions discovered Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, the Solomon Islands, the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific. In the quest for Terra Australis, Spanish explorations in the 17th century, such as the expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, discovered the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos, sailed the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, named after navigator Luís Vaz de Torres. Dutch explorers, sailing around southern Africa engaged in discovery and trade.
In the 16th and 17th centuries Spain considered the Pacific Ocean a mare clausum—a sea closed to other naval powers. As the only known entrance from the Atlantic, the Strait of Magellan was at times patrolled by fleets sent to prevent entrance of non-Spanish ships. On the western side of the Pacific Ocean the Dutch threatened the Spanish Philippines; the 18th cen
Sweden
Sweden the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Scandinavian Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north and Finland to the east, is connected to Denmark in the southwest by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund, a strait at the Swedish-Danish border. At 450,295 square kilometres, Sweden is the largest country in Northern Europe, the third-largest country in the European Union and the fifth largest country in Europe by area. Sweden has a total population of 10.2 million. It has a low population density of 22 inhabitants per square kilometre; the highest concentration is in the southern half of the country. Germanic peoples have inhabited Sweden since prehistoric times, emerging into history as the Geats and Swedes and constituting the sea peoples known as the Norsemen. Southern Sweden is predominantly agricultural, while the north is forested. Sweden is part of the geographical area of Fennoscandia; the climate is in general mild for its northerly latitude due to significant maritime influence, that in spite of this still retains warm continental summers.
Today, the sovereign state of Sweden is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, with a monarch as head of state, like its neighbour Norway. The capital city is Stockholm, the most populous city in the country. Legislative power is vested in the 349-member unicameral Riksdag. Executive power is exercised by the government chaired by the prime minister. Sweden is a unitary state divided into 21 counties and 290 municipalities. An independent Swedish state emerged during the early 12th century. After the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century killed about a third of the Scandinavian population, the Hanseatic League threatened Scandinavia's culture and languages; this led to the forming of the Scandinavian Kalmar Union in 1397, which Sweden left in 1523. When Sweden became involved in the Thirty Years War on the Reformist side, an expansion of its territories began and the Swedish Empire was formed; this became one of the great powers of Europe until the early 18th century. Swedish territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries, ending with the annexation of present-day Finland by Russia in 1809.
The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Norway was militarily forced into personal union. Since Sweden has been at peace, maintaining an official policy of neutrality in foreign affairs; the union with Norway was peacefully dissolved in 1905. Sweden was formally neutral through both world wars and the Cold War, albeit Sweden has since 2009 moved towards cooperation with NATO. After the end of the Cold War, Sweden joined the European Union on 1 January 1995, but declined NATO membership, as well as Eurozone membership following a referendum, it is a member of the United Nations, the Nordic Council, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sweden maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides universal health care and tertiary education for its citizens, it has the world's eleventh-highest per capita income and ranks in numerous metrics of national performance, including quality of life, education, protection of civil liberties, economic competitiveness, equality and human development.
The name Sweden was loaned from Dutch in the 17th century to refer to Sweden as an emerging great power. Before Sweden's imperial expansion, Early Modern English used Swedeland. Sweden is derived through back-formation from Old English Swēoþēod, which meant "people of the Swedes"; this word is derived from Sweon/Sweonas. The Swedish name Sverige means "realm of the Swedes", excluding the Geats in Götaland. Variations of the name Sweden are used in most languages, with the exception of Danish and Norwegian using Sverige, Faroese Svøríki, Icelandic Svíþjóð, the more notable exception of some Finnic languages where Ruotsi and Rootsi are used, names considered as referring to the people from the coastal areas of Roslagen, who were known as the Rus', through them etymologically related to the English name for Russia; the etymology of Swedes, thus Sweden, is not agreed upon but may derive from Proto-Germanic Swihoniz meaning "one's own", referring to one's own Germanic tribe. Sweden's prehistory begins in the Allerød oscillation, a warm period around 12,000 BC, with Late Palaeolithic reindeer-hunting camps of the Bromme culture at the edge of the ice in what is now the country's southernmost province, Scania.
This period was characterised by small bands of hunter-gatherer-fishers using flint technology. Sweden is first described in a written source in Germania by Tacitus in 98 AD. In Germania 44 and 45 he mentions the Swedes as a powerful tribe with ships that had a prow at each end. Which kings ruled these Suiones is unknown, but Norse mythology presents a long line of legendary and semi-legendary kings going back to the last centuries BC; as for literacy in Sweden itself, the runic script was in use among the south Scandinavian elite by at least the 2nd century AD, but all that has come down to the present from the Roman Period is curt inscriptions on artefacts of male names, demonstrating th
Omai
Mai, mistakenly known as Omai in Britain, was a young Ra'iatean man who became the second Pacific Islander to visit Europe, after Ahu-toru, brought to Paris by Bougainville in 1768. Ma'i described himself, his father was killed by Puni's Borabora warriors. Fleeing to Tahiti, Ma'i was wounded in the encounter with the Dolphin in 1767. Ma'i became an apprentice to a priest. Returning to Ra'iatea, he was taken to Borabora. Narrowly escaping death there, he escaped to Huahine. Omai met Captain James Cook in 1769 in Tahiti. In August 1773 he embarked from Huahine on the British ship HMS Adventure, commanded by Tobias Furneaux, which had touched at Tahiti as part of Cook's second voyage of discovery in the Pacific. Omai travelled to Europe on Adventure, arriving at London in October 1774 where he was introduced into British society by the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. During his two-year stay in England, Omai became much admired within London high society. Renowned for his charm, quick wit and exotic good looks, he became a favourite of the aristocratic elite.
Banks invited Omai to dine with the Royal Society and arranged meetings with notable celebrities, including Lord Sandwich, Dr Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, Anna Seward, among others. Richard Holmes remarks that Omai's idiosyncratic behaviour and distinctive bow were celebrated. Indeed, during one famed meeting with King George III at Kew, Omai is said to have delivered his bow grasped the King's hand, declaring, "How do, King Tosh!"He was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, among others. Omai's journey to England and subsequent return to Tahiti with Cook's third voyage in 1776 became the subject of a theatrical production and directed by the dramatist John O'Keefe, entitled Omai – A Voyage ‘round the World, performed during the 1785 Christmas season at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. Omai returned to Huahine in August 1777 and was settled with a European-style house, furniture and two Maori boys as his servants. During the Bounty's visit to Tahiti in 1789, Captain Bligh was told Omai had died about two and a half years after Cook's departure in November 1777.
Connaughton, Omai: The Prince Who Never Was, London: Timewell Press, ISBN 1-85725-205-5 Omai, Captain Cook Birthplace Museum website
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
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