San Francisco
San Francisco the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 13th-most populous city in the United States, the fourth-most populous in California, with 884,363 residents as of 2017, it covers an area of about 46.89 square miles at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second-most densely populated large US city, the fifth-most densely populated U. S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is part of the fifth-most populous primary statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area; as of 2017, it was the seventh-highest income county in the United States, with a per capita personal income of $119,868. As of 2015, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $154.2 billion, a GDP per capita of $177,968. The San Francisco CSA was the country's third-largest urban economy as of 2017, with a GDP of $907 billion.
Of the 500+ primary statistical areas in the US, the San Francisco CSA had among the highest GDP per capita in 2017, at $93,938. San Francisco was ranked 14th in the world and third in the United States on the Global Financial Centres Index as of September 2018. San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, all named for St. Francis of Assisi; the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856. San Francisco's status as the West Coast's largest city peaked between 1870 and 1900, when around 25% of California's population resided in the city proper. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a major port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater.
It became the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, along with the rise of the "hippie" counterculture, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States. Politically, the city votes along liberal Democratic Party lines. A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, its Chinatown district. San Francisco is the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Gap Inc. Fitbit, Salesforce.com, Reddit, Inc. Dolby, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Pinterest, Uber, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation and Weather Underground.
It is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the University of San Francisco, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the De Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Academy of Sciences. As of 2019, San Francisco is the highest rated American city on world liveability rankings; the earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. The Yelamu group of the Ohlone people resided in a few small villages when an overland Spanish exploration party, led by Don Gaspar de Portolà, arrived on November 2, 1769, the first documented European visit to San Francisco Bay. Seven years on March 28, 1776, the Spanish established the Presidio of San Francisco, followed by a mission, Mission San Francisco de Asís, established by the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the area became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the mission system ended, its lands became privatized.
In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, near a boat anchorage around what is today Portsmouth Square. Together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7, 1846, during the Mexican–American War, Captain John B. Montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, Mexico ceded the territory to the United States at the end of the war. Despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography; the California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers. With their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849; the promise of great wealth was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor.
Some of these 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships and hotels.
Art UK
Art UK is a registered charity in the United Kingdom known as the Public Catalogue Foundation. It was founded for the project, completed between 2003 and 2012, of obtaining sufficient rights to enable the public to see images of all the 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom; the paintings were made accessible through a series of affordable book catalogues by county. The same images and information were placed on a website in partnership with the BBC called Your Paintings, hosted as part of the BBC website; the renaming in 2016 coincided with the transfer of the website to a stand-alone site. Works by some 40,000 painters held in over 3,000 collections are now on the website. Future plans include a similar project to cover sculptures in public collections, which will begin in 2017. From June 2016 museums and other organisations will be able to upload images of their watercolour paintings and prints to the Art UK website; the catalogues and website allow readers to see an illustration in colour, short description of every painting in the UK's national collections.
This information has significant educational benefits and constitutes the building blocks for art historical research. Revenue from catalogue sales made by collections is dedicated to the conservation and restoration of oil paintings in their care. Coverage includes national and local museums and council collections, paintings in universities, bishop's palaces of the Church of England, the properties owned by the National Trust, some other private institutions such as the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities; the collections of bodies such as Arts Council England, English Heritage and the Government Art Collection are included. However the Royal Collection is not included. Art UK receives funding from other sources. Of the 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK, around 80% are not on public view. Many are held in storage or civic buildings without routine public access. At the same time, many of these collections have incomplete cataloguing records. Since 2003, The Public Catalogue Foundation has been working to rectify this through a series of colour catalogues.
Before these were completed it was clear that a website was the best way to reach the wider public, a key aim of the project, so a combined approach was adopted. The Oil Paintings in Public Ownership book series is published by The PCF on a collection or county-by-county basis; each volume brings together all the oil and tempera paintings in a county's museum collections, together with paintings held in civic buildings such as town halls, universities and fire stations. Each county catalogue contains a colour photograph and basic information about each painting. All paintings are reproduced regardless of condition; the PCF’s first catalogue was published in June 2004, the series is now complete in 85 volumes. The Public Catalogue Foundation worked with the BBC to put all of the UK's publicly owned oil paintings online. In January 2009 a partnership with the BBC was announced with the aim to place the entire catalogue of publicly owned oil paintings online by 2012. On 4 October 2012 it was announced that the project had photographed every painting that it intended to and all 210,000 would shortly be available.
A section of the BBC website, Your Paintings, was launched in 2011. The PCF completed the digitisation of the entire national collection and celebrated their success in February 2013. An innovative crowdsourcing project, Your Paintings Tagger went online in 2011, to generate the metadata necessary to make Your Paintings searchable; the high-quality digital files, have not been made available to the public, paintings on the BBC site can only be'saved' as a'personal collection' on the site, not downloaded. In March 2013 the BBC revealed that an unknown painting by Anthony van Dyck had been discovered because of the Your Paintings website; the painting of Olivia, wife of Endymion Porter, had been discovered on-line and although it was thought it to be in the style of the Van Dyck, experts now agreed that the painting was an unknown original. Olivia, the subject of the painting, who died in 1663, was a lady-in-waiting to queen consort Henrietta Maria, she had married Endymion Porter, a patron of Anthony van Dyck.
A Culture Show TV programme noted that the painting had not been published and it was the Your Paintings website that had allowed this attribution. Art UK collaborates in making the BBC Four television series Britain's Lost Masterpieces. In 2016 Your Paintings was moved to a new dedicated website for Art UK, which will in time feature a much wider range of artworks; the earlier catalogues published are listed below. Oil paintings in public ownership in West Yorkshire: Leeds, The Public Catalogue Foundation, Lucy Ellis, 2004, ISBN 9781904931003 Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in Kent, The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2004 ISBN 9781904931027 Oil paintings in public ownership in West Sussex, The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2005, ISBN 9781904931041 Oil paintings in public ownership in London: The Slade School of Fine Art & University College London Art Collections, The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2005, ISBN 9781904931065 Oil paintings in public ownership in East Sussex, The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2005, ISBN 9781904931089 Oil paintings in public ownership in Suffolk, T
Lloyd's of London
Lloyd's of London known as Lloyd's, is an insurance and reinsurance market located in London, United Kingdom. Unlike most of its competitors in the industry, it is not an insurance company; these underwriters, or "members", are a collection of both corporations and private individuals, the latter being traditionally known as "Names". The business underwritten at Lloyd's is predominantly general insurance and reinsurance, although a small number of syndicates write term life assurance; the market has its roots in marine insurance and was founded by Edward Lloyd at his coffee house on Tower Street in c. 1686. Today, it has a dedicated building on Lime Street within which business is transacted at each syndicate's "box" in the underwriting "Room", with the insurance policy documentation being known traditionally as a "slip"; the market's motto is Fidentia, Latin for "confidence", it is associated with the Latin phrase uberrima fides, or "utmost good faith", representing the relationship between underwriters and brokers.
Having survived multiple scandals and significant challenges through the second half of the 20th century, most notably the asbestosis affair, Lloyd's today promotes its strong financial "chain of security" available to promptly pay all valid claims. At the end of 2018 this chain consisted of £53.5 billion of syndicate-level assets. In 2018 there were 84 syndicates managed by 55 managing agencies that collectively wrote £35.5bn of gross premiums on risks placed by 303 approved brokers. Around 50 per cent of premiums emanated from North America, 30 per cent from Europe and 20 per cent from the rest of the world. Direct insurance represented around 70 per cent of the premiums covering property and casualty, while the remaining 30 per cent was reinsurance; the market collectively reported a pre-tax loss of £1bn for 2018, resulting from above-average major claims and a weak investment environment. The market began in Lloyd's Coffee House, owned by Edward Lloyd, in around 1686 on Tower Street in the City of London.
This establishment was a popular place for sailors and ship-owners, Lloyd catered to them with reliable shipping news. The coffee house soon became recognised as an ideal place for obtaining marine insurance; the shop was frequented by mariners involved in the slave trade. Historian Eric Williams notes: "Lloyd's, like other insurance companies, insured slaves and slave ships, was vitally interested in legal decisions as to what constituted'natural death' and'perils of the sea'." Lloyd's obtained a monopoly on maritime insurance related to the slave trade and maintained it until the early 19th century. Just after Christmas 1691, the small club of marine insurance underwriters relocated to Lombard Street; this arrangement carried on until 1773, long after the death of Edward Lloyd in 1713, when the participating members of the insurance arrangement formed a committee and underwriter John Julius Angerstein acquired two rooms at the Royal Exchange in Cornhill for "The Society of Lloyd's". The Royal Exchange was destroyed by fire in 1838.
It was rebuilt by 1844. In 1871, the first Lloyd's Act was passed in Parliament which gave the business a sound legal footing. Around that time, it was unusual for a Lloyd's syndicate to have six backers. A marine underwriter named Frederick Marten is credited for first identifying this issue and creating the first "large syndicate" of 12 capacity providers. By the 1880s Marten's syndicate had outgrown many of the major insurance companies outside Lloyd's. A subsequent Lloyd's Act in 1911 set out the Society's objectives, which include the promotion of its members' interests and the collection and dissemination of information. On 18 April 1906 a major earthquake and resulting fires destroyed over 80 per cent of the city of San Francisco; this event was to have a profound influence on building practices, risk modelling and the insurance industry. Lloyd's losses from the earthquake and fires were substantial though the writing of insurance business overseas was viewed with some wariness at the time.
While some insurance companies were denying claims for fire damage under their earthquake policies or vice versa, one of Lloyd's leading underwriters, Cuthbert Heath, famously instructed his San Francisco agent to "pay all of our policy-holders in full, irrespective of the terms of their policies". The prompt and full payment of all claims helped to cement Lloyd's reputation for reliable claim payments and as an important trading partner for US brokers and policyholders, it was estimated that around 90 per cent of the damage to the city was caused by the resultant fires, as such since 1906 fire following earthquake has been a specified insured peril under most policies. Heath is credited for introducing the now used "excess of loss" reinsurance protection for insurers following the San Francisco disaster. Heath's background was that he became an underwriting member of Lloyd's in 1880, upon reaching the minimum age of 21, on J. S. Burrows' syndicate. Within a year he was underwriting for himself on a three-man syndicate, in 1883 he opened a brokerage business.
In 1885 he wrote the first fire reinsurance contra
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist, active during the American Gilded Age and based in the United Kingdom. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake", his famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality: his art is characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative, he found a parallel between painting and music and entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His most famous painting is Arrangement in Black No. 1 known as Whistler's Mother, the revered and parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers. James Abbott Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on July 11, 1834, the first child of Anna McNeill Whistler and George Washington Whistler, the brother of Confederate surgeon Dr. William McNeill Whistler.
His father was a railroad engineer, Anna was his second wife. James lived the first three years of his life in a modest house at 243 Worthen Street in Lowell; the house is now the Whistler House Museum of a museum dedicated to him. He claimed St. Petersburg, Russia as his birthplace during the Ruskin trial: "I shall be born when and where I want, I do not choose to be born in Lowell."The family moved from Lowell to Stonington, Connecticut in 1837, where his father worked for the Stonington Railroad. Three of the couple's children died in infancy during this period, their fortunes improved in 1839 when his father became chief engineer for the Boston & Albany Railroad, the family built a mansion in Springfield, Massachusetts where the Wood Museum of History now stands.) They lived in Springfield until they left the United States in late 1842. Nicholas I of Russia learned of George Whistler's ingenuity in engineering the Boston & Albany Railroad, he offered him a position in 1842 engineering a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the family moved from to St. Petersburg in the winter of 1842/43.
Whistler was a moody child prone to fits of temper and insolence, he drifted into periods of laziness after bouts of illness. His parents discovered that drawing settled him down and helped focus his attention. In years, he played up his mother's connection to the American South and its roots, he presented himself as an impoverished Southern aristocrat, although it remains unclear to what extent he sympathized with the Southern cause during the American Civil War, he adopted his mother's maiden name. Beginning in 1842, his father was employed to work on a railroad in Russia. After moving to St. Petersburg to join his father a year the young Whistler took private art lessons enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts at age eleven; the young artist followed the traditional curriculum of drawing from plaster casts and occasional live models, reveled in the atmosphere of art talk with older peers, pleased his parents with a first-class mark in anatomy. In 1844, he met the noted artist Sir William Allan, who came to Russia with a commission to paint a history of the life of Peter the Great.
Whistler's mother noted in her diary, "the great artist remarked to me'Your little boy has uncommon genius, but do not urge him beyond his inclination.'"In 1847-48, his family spent some time in London with relatives, while his father stayed in Russia. Whistler's brother-in-law Francis Haden, a physician, an artist, spurred his interest in art and photography. Haden took Whistler to visit collectors and to lectures, gave him a watercolor set with instruction. Whistler was imagining an art career, he began to collect books on art and he studied other artists' techniques. When his portrait was painted by Sir William Boxall in 1848, the young Whistler exclaimed that the portrait was "very much like me and a fine picture. Mr. Boxall is a beautiful colourist... It is a beautiful creamy surface, looks so rich." In his blossoming enthusiasm for art, at fifteen, he informed his father by letter of his future direction, "I hope, dear father, you will not object to my choice." His father, died from cholera at the age of forty-nine, the Whistler family moved back to his mother's hometown of Pomfret, Connecticut.
His art plans remained vague and his future uncertain. The family managed to get by on a limited income, his cousin reported that Whistler at that time was "slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls... he had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, aided by natural abilities, made him charming at that age." Whistler was sent to Christ Church Hall School with his mother's hopes that he would become a minister. Whistler was without his sketchbook and was popular with his classmates for his caricatures. However, it became clear that a career in religion did not suit him, so he applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father had taught drawing and other relatives had attended, he was admitted to the selective institution in July 1851 on the strength of his family name, despite his extreme nearsightedness and poor health history. However, during his three years there, his grades were satisfactory, he was a sorry sight at drill and dress, known as "Curly" for his hair length which exceeded regulations.
Whistler bucked authority, spouted sarcastic comments, racked up deme
Cyrus Cuneo
Cyrus Cincinato Cuneo, known as Ciro, was an artist, born into an Italian American family of artists and musicians. His parents were Annie Cuneo; the family lived on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco's Italian American neighborhood of North Beach. He moved to Europe, on 20 October 1903 marrying Nell Marion Tenison, whom he met while studying with James McNeill Whistler in Paris, they moved to England and lived in London, where Cuneo worked on paintings, as well as illustrations for books and magazines. Works by Cyrus Cuneo at Project Gutenberg Works by Cyrus Cuneo at Faded Page Works by or about Cyrus Cuneo at Internet ArchiveCuneo: A Family of Early California Artists, 2009, Museo ItaloAmericano, San Francisco, California The Cuneo Society Website Cyrus's page on Terence Cuneo Website Drink: a love story on a great question by Hall Caine, 1906, illustrated by Cyrus Cuneo
