Help
Add this page to your book
Show book (0 pages)
Suggest pagesArthur Lasenby Liberty
Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty (13 August 1843 – 11 May 1917) was a London merchant, and the founder of Liberty & Co.[1][2]
Born in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, England, the son of a draper, he began work at sixteen with his uncle who sold lace, and later, another uncle who sold wine. By 1859 he was apprenticed to a draper, but he instead took a job at Farmer and Rogers which specialized in women's fashions. He quickly rose to manager of the warehouse.
After Farmer and Rogers refused to make him a partner in their business, so in 1875, he opened his own shop, Liberty & Co in Regent Street, London. There, he sold ornaments, fabrics and miscellaneous art objects from the Far East.
Liberty & Co first catered for an eclectic mixture of popular styles, but then went on to develop a fundamentally different style closely linked to the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, Art Nouveau (the "new art"). The company became synonymous with this new style to the extent that in Italy, Art Nouveau became known as Stile Liberty after the London shop. The company's selection of printed and dyed fabrics, particularly silks and satins, was noted for its range of subtle and "artistic" colours and was highly esteemed for dress fabrics, especially during the decades from 1890 to 1920.
Arthur Liberty married Emma Louise Blackmore in 1875. They had no children. Before he died, Liberty had amassed a small fortune as a majority shareholder in Liberty & Co. (It had become a public limited liability company in 1890). He left a manor house, several cottages and a large area of farmland near his birthplace in Buckinghamshire.[3] He was knighted in 1913.
His gravestone was designed by Archibald Knox, one of Liberty & Co's long-standing designers.
[edit] References
- ^ "LIBERTY, Arthur Lasenby". Who's Who, 59: pp. 1057–1058. 1907. http://books.google.com/books?id=yEcuAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1057.
- ^ "LIBERTY, SIR ARTHUR LASENBY". Encyclopaedia Britannica, the new volumes. 2 (12th ed.). 1922. p. 759. http://books.google.com/books?id=x70UAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA759.
- ^ http://jrose.dynip.com/family/archives/documents/correspondence/email/00-04-12_Liberty_et_al_Part_I.HTM [dead link]
Levy, Mervyn (1986) Liberty Style, The Classic Years, 1898-1910; Rizzoli, New York.
[edit] External links
| Honorary titles | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Phillip Rose |
High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire 1899 |
Succeeded by Sir Robert Harvey |
 |
This article about a British businessperson born in the 1840s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
