title: Robert Morris (financier)

texts:
 constitution and establish a new state government. At the same time, Congress was debating whether to formally declare independence from Britain. By early July 1776, Pennsylvania's delegation was the lone congressional delegation opposed to declaring independence. <mask> refused to vote for independence, but he and another Pennsylvania delegate agreed to excuse themselves from the vote on independence, thereby giving the pro-independence movement a majority in the Pennsylvania delegation. With <mask> absent, all congressional delegations voted to pass a resolution declaring independence on July 2, and the United States formally declared independence on July 4, 1776. Despite his opposition to independence, and much to <mask>'s surprise, the Pennsylvania constitutional convention voted to keep <mask> in Congress; he was the lone anti-independence delegate from Pennsylvania to retain his position.In August, <mask> signed the Declaration of Independence despite having abstained. In explaining his decision, he stated, "I am not one of those politicians that run testy when my own plans are not adopted. I think it is the duty of a good citizen to follow when he cannot lead." He also stated, "while I do not wish to see my countrymen die on the field of battle nor do I wish to see them live in tyranny". Continued war, August 1776–1778

After the Declaration of Independence was issued, <mask> continued to supervise and coordinate efforts to secure arms and ammunition and export American goods. His strategy focused on using ships from New England to export tobacco and other goods from the Southern states to Europe and the islands of the Caribbean, then using the capital obtained from those exports to purchase military supplies from Europe. British spies and warships often frustrated his plans, and many American ships were captured in the midst of trading operations.In response, <mask> authorized American envoys in Europe to commission privateers to attack British shipping, and he arranged for an agent, William Bingham, to pay for repairs to American privateers on the French island of Martinique. Due to the lucrative nature of privateering, <mask> also started outfitting his own privateers. Another agent of <mask>'s, his half-brother <mask>, proved a disastrous choice for managing American privateers in Europe, as Thomas engaged in binge drinking and mismanaged funds. In October 1776, at the urging of <mask> and Benjamin Franklin, Congress authorized the appointment of two envoys charged with seeking a formal treaty of alliance with France; ultimately, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee were appointed as those envoys. Along with Silas Deane, Franklin would help to greatly expand arms shipments from France and Spain, but Lee proved to be completely incompetent in his efforts to gain support from Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy. In early December 1776, Washington's army was forced to retreat across the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania, and most members of Congress temporarily left Philadelphia. <mask> was one of few delegates to remain in the city, and Congress appointed <mask> and two other delegates to "execute Continental business" in its absence.<mask> frequently corresponded with Washington, and he provided supplies that helped enable the Continental victory at the Battle of Trenton. After the Continental Army was defeated in the September 1777 Battle of Brandywine, Congress fled west from Philadelphia; <mask> and his family went to live at the estate they had recently purchased in Manheim, Pennsylvania. <mask> obtained a leave of absence in late 1777, but he spent much of his time defending himself against attacks regarding alleged mismanagement and financial improprieties levied by the pro-slavery allies of Henry Laurens, the president of the Continental Congress. Due to his leave of absence, <mask> did not play a large role in drafting the Articles of Confederation, which would be the first constitution of the United States, but he signed the document in March 1778. As some states objected to the Articles, it would not enter into force until 1781. <mask> returned to Congress in May 1778 to vote for a measure to provide pensions to Continental Army officers. He formed a close working relationship with Gouverneur <mask> (no relation), a young New York congressman who shared many of <mask>'s views.The following month, <mask> returned with Congress to Philadelphia, which had been evacuated by the British. <mask> did not resume his wide array of duties in Congress, seeking instead to wind down his projects so that he could focus on business. In late 1778, <mask> won election to the state assembly as part of a slate of candidates that favored reforming the Pennsylvania constitution; he resigned from Congress to take up his seat. After <mask> left Congress, slave trader, Henry Laurens, Thomas Paine, and some other members of Congress continued their false attacks on him for allegedly using his position in Congress for his own financial benefit, but in early 1779 a congressional committee cleared <mask> of all charges. Out of Congress, 1779–1781

With their plans to call a new state constitutional convention frustrated by Joseph Reed and others, <mask> and James Wilson founded the Republican Society, a political club devoted to implementing a new state constitution. The Republican Society favored a bicameral legislature, a state executive with veto power, an independent judiciary, and an end to loyalty oaths to the state government. Other prominent Pennsylvanians, including Wilson, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and Charles Thomson, supported the Republican Society's goals, but <mask> became the de facto leader of the faction that became known as the Republicans.Meanwhile, those who favored maintaining the state constitution became known as the Constitutionalists. Due to rising inflation, in mid-1779 the Constitutionalists established a committee to implement price controls; numerous Philadelphia merchants were arrested for allegedly violating the committee's orders, but <mask> avoided imprisonment and emerged as a leading opponent of the committee. The price control committee proved ineffective and disbanded in September, but the following month a mob rioted and seized several Republican leaders. <mask> and other Republicans sheltered at James Wilson's house, where they were rescued by Reed and a detachment of the Continental Army. Wilson fled the city after the riot, and popular anger at merchants resulted in <mask>'s defeat in his campaign for re-election to the state legislature. Out of public office for the first time since the start of the American Revolution, <mask> focused on expanding his shipping business. He partnered with several out-of-state businessmen, including Jonathan Hudson of Maryland and Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, to form what biographer Charles Rappleye calls "the first national conglomerate."In these trading ventures, <mask> often provided financing and oversight but left the details to his partners. With national finances in tatters, <mask> led a group of merchants in creating the Bank of Pennsylvania, which provided funding for the purchase of supplies by the Continental Army. The bank did not engage in the full range of modern banking activities, but it did accept deposits and provide a potential model for monetary reforms at the national level. The success of the bank provided a boost to <mask>'s popularity, and in October 1780, he won election to the state legislature. Superintendent of Finance

First months

In the midst of the American Revolutionary War, U.S. government finances fell into a poor state as Congress lacked the power to raise revenue and the states largely refused to furnish funding. Without a mechanism for raising revenue, Congress repeatedly issued paper money, leading to rampant inflation. By 1781, the U.S. faced an unremitting financial crisis, which was underscored by the January 1781 Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, in which ten poorly fed, unpaid Continental Army regiments demanded better conditions from Congress.Though the mutiny was put down, it convinced Congress to implement reforms that created the departments of war, marine, finance, and foreign affairs, each of which would be led by a departmental executive. By a unanimous vote, Congress selected <mask> as the Superintendent of Finance. <mask> accepted appointment as the Superintendent of Finance in May 1781, and he appointed Gouverneur <mask> as his deputy. <mask> soon emerged as the key economic official in the country and became a leader of the Nationalist faction, an informal group of American leaders who favored a stronger national government. He also had effective control over foreign affairs until <mask>. Livingston was appointed as Secretary of Foreign Affairs later in the year. In September 1781, <mask> reluctantly agreed to serve as the Agent of Marine, giving him civilian leadership of the Continental Navy. Congress filled the last of the executive positions in November, when Benjamin Lincoln accepted appointment as Secretary of War.Along with General Washington and Continental Congress secretary Charles Thomson, the three executives served as the leaders of the de facto first national executive branch in U.S. history; <mask> assumed an unofficial role as the leading department secretary. All three executives, as well as Washington, aligned with the Nationalist faction, and they all cooperated to enhance the power of the national government. In mid-1782, Congress established standing committees to provide oversight to the executive departments; <mask> supported the congressional reorganization, but to his dismay, his longtime foe Arthur Lee became the chairman of the committee overseeing the finance department. <mask> pursued an array of reforms designed to boost the economy; many of the reforms were inspired by the laissez-faire economic ideas of Adam Smith. Shortly after taking office, he convinced Congress to establish the Bank of North America, the first bank to operate in the United States. Such a bank had been discussed in the months prior to <mask>'s appointment, but the bank itself was organized along lines laid out by <mask> and Gouverneur <mask>. It was established as a private institution governed by its investors, but was subject to inspection by the Superintendent of Finance.The bank would take the national government's deposits, provide loans to Congress, and issue banknotes. <mask> hoped that the bank would help finance the war, stabilize the nation's currency, and bring the country together under one unified monetary policy. As the bank would take some time to begin functioning, in 1781 <mask> presided over the issuing of a new currency, referred to as "<mask> notes," backed by <mask>'s own funds. <mask> also convinced Congress to allow him to purchase all supplies for the Continental Army, and Congress required states to furnish funding rather than supplying goods like flour or meat. By 1781, the Revolutionary War had become a stalemate between Britain and the United States. The British had concentrated their military operations in the Southern theater of the war, while leaving a large force garrisoned at New York City. In August 1781, <mask> met with General Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, who were planning a joint Franco-American operation against the British forces.<mask> redirected government funds to purchase supplies for Washington's march against British forces in Virginia, and he pleaded with state governments and the French government for further funding, with the final $20,000 needed coming from <mask>'s longtime collaborator, Haym Salomon. At the October 1781 Battle of Yorktown, Washington forced the surrender of the British army under the command of General Cornwallis. After the Battle of Yorktown, Britain essentially abandoned its campaign on land, but the naval war continued as Britain sought to cut the United States off from its sources of trade. After Yorktown

Months after the Battle of Yorktown, <mask> issued the "Report on Public Credit," an ambitious economic plan calling for the full payment of the country's war debt through new revenue measures. It included a head tax on slaves in the various states, but above all, he pushed for a federal tariff of five percent on all imported goods, which would require an amendment to the recently approved Articles of Confederation. Such an amendment would greatly strengthen the power of the national government, but the amendment process required the consent of each state, and many states were reluctant to alter the balance of power between the states and the national government. The Articles gave Congress the sole power to conduct foreign policy, but the states retained all power over funding; Congress had no independent power to raise funds, and lacked any mechanism to force states provide the funds that they owed to Congress.Writing to the state governors, <mask> argued that it was "high time to reliever ourselves from the infamy we have already sustained, and to rescue and restore the national credit. This can only be done by solid revenue." By late 1782, all of the states but Rhode Island had agreed to back an amendment allowing the tariff, but that was enough to block the amendment. Though he was frustrated in the tariff battle, <mask> continued to implement and propose other economic reforms. In January 1782, after receiving its charter from Congress, the Bank of North America commenced operations, and the bank's currency soon achieved wide circulation. <mask> sought the establishment of a national mint to provide for a single coinage throughout the United States, and proposed the first decimal currency, but Congress was unwilling to back this project. He appointed several receivers, including Alexander Hamilton, to help circulate banknotes, report on the prices of goods, and perform other functions in places throughout the United States.He also reformed government procurement of supplies, saving money by placing the onus for the storage and transport of supplies on government contractors. Even after implementing several financial reforms, <mask> was unable to pay the soldiers of the Continental Army. The chief issue, aside from the unwillingness of the states to amend the Articles of Confederation, was the unwillingness of the states to supply adequate funding; many states refused to furnish any funds at all. The Bank of North America provided some loans, but eventually refused to furnish more funds until previous loans were paid off. <mask>'s efforts were further complicated by France's reluctance to extend more loans, as well as a drop-off in American trade, caused in part by British naval operations. In December 1782, shortly after the apparent defeat of the proposed amendment to allow the national government to levy a tariff, General Alexander McDougall led a delegation that presented a petition for immediate payment on behalf of the Continental Army. While <mask> helped temporarily defuse the crisis by offering the soldiers one month's pay, the petition reflected widespread unhappiness in the Continental Army at the continued lack of pay.Some Nationalists, including Gouverneur <mask>, believed that only the discontent of the army could force the adoption of the amendment authorizing Congress to impose a tariff. In March, Colonel Walter Stewart delivered the "Newburgh Address," in which he urged members of the Continental Army to rise up against Congress and demand payment. Washington prevented a mutiny by assuring the soldiers that they would eventually be paid. In the aftermath of the near-mutiny, <mask> denied that he had played any role in fomenting insurrection. Nonetheless, some misguided historians believe that <mask> was part of the "Newburgh Conspiracy." The facts, however reveal the material was written by Major John Armstrong, who was rewarded with the position of Secretary of the Executive Council in Pennsylvania upon his return from New York. Frustrated by his defeat in the tariff battle and the failure of states to provide adequate funding, <mask> thought he was being forced to run

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title: Robert Morris (financier)

type: original

texts:
 up debts that the states were unwilling to pay.Writing that he would not be the "Minister of Injustice", he submitted his resignation in early 1783, but Hamilton and other Nationalists convinced him to stay in office. As of January 1, 1783 the public debt was $42 million of which 18.77 percent was foreign debt and 81.23 percent was owned at home.In a report to the President of Congress <mask> wrote:

Domestic Debt...$35,327,769
of which
Loan Certificates...$11,463,802 [with two years interest loan due $877,828]
Army Debt...$635,618.00
The rest being unliquidated debts, etc., interest. At roughly the same time, <mask> and others in Philadelphia learned that the United States and Britain had signed a preliminary peace agreement, bringing an unofficial end to the Revolutionary War. Congress approved a furlough of the Continental Army soldiers, subject to recall in case hostilities broke out once again. <mask> distributed "Morris notes" to the remaining soldiers, but many soldiers departed for their homes rather than waiting for the notes. After a mutiny over pay broke out in Pennsylvania, Congress voted to leave Philadelphia and establish a provincial capital in Princeton, New Jersey; the mutiny dissipated shortly thereafter. Nationalists were devastated by this turn of events, and Hamilton resigned from Congress in mid-1783 after his proposal for convention to revise the Articles of Confederation was ignored.In November 1784, <mask> resigned from his government positions. Rather than finding a successor for <mask>, Congress established the three-member Board of Treasury, consisting of Arthur Lee, William Livingston, and Samuel Osgood. In 1778–1779 <mask> had attempted to strengthen out the accounts of the old Commercial Committee but had to give it up; he stated in answer to Paine "..the accounts of Willing and <mask> with the committee had been partially settled, but were still partially open, because the transactions could not be closed up." The Treasury Board elected in 1794-1795 those old accounts were brought to a settlement—a June 1796 entry in the Treasury debt against <mask> for $93,312.63. <mask> would explain in 1800 in debtors' prison that in fact the debt was due not just to himself but also his partners John Ross and Thomas Willing. Later political career

Constitutional convention

After leaving office, <mask> once again devoted himself to business, but state and federal politics remained a factor in his life. After the Pennsylvania legislature stripped the Bank of North America of its charter, <mask> won election to the state legislature and helped restore the bank's charter.Meanwhile, the United States suffered a sustained recession after the end of the Revolutionary War, caused by the lingering debt burden and new restrictions on trade imposed by the European powers. Some members of Congress, including those on the Board of Treasury, continued to favor amendments to the Articles of Confederation, but the states still refused to authorize major changes to the Articles. In 1786, <mask> was one of five Pennsylvania delegates selected to attend the Annapolis Convention, where delegates discussed ways to reform the Articles of Confederation. Though <mask> ultimately declined to attend the convention, the delegates convinced Congress to authorize a convention in Philadelphia in May 1787 to amend the Articles. The Pennsylvania state legislature sent a delegation consisting of <mask>, James Wilson, Gouverneur <mask>, George Clymer, Thomas Mifflin, Jared Ingersoll, and Ben Franklin to the Philadelphia Convention. With the exception of Franklin (who avoided aligning with either political faction in Pennsylvania), all of the Pennsylvania delegates were closely aligned with <mask>'s Republican faction, a reflection of Republican strength in the state legislature. Many of <mask>'s Nationalist allies from other states, including Hamilton, James Madison, John Dickinson, and Washington, would also attend the convention.With Franklin ill, <mask> opened the proceedings of the Philadelphia Convention on May 25. His motion to nominate Washington as chairman of the convention was backed by a unanimous vote. <mask> consistently attended the meeting of the convention, but rarely spoke after the first day, instead allowing lawyers and others more experienced with the law to debate various issues. His primary goals, including a provision ensuring the federal government had the power to lay tariffs and taxes, were shared by the vast majority of delegates at the convention. On September 17, <mask> signed the final document produced by the convention which, rather than amending the Articles, was intended to supplant the Articles as the new Constitution of the United States. <mask> was one of just six individuals to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Rather than seeking to block the new constitution, Congress simply forwarded it to each state to debate ratification.<mask>'s Republican faction, along with Federalist groups in other states, sought the ratification of the new federal Constitution. The Constitutionalists, who saw the new federal constitution as a threat to state sovereignty, joined with Anti-Federalists in other states in seeking to prevent the ratification of the Constitution. In elections held in October and November 1787, <mask>'s Federalist allies retained control of the state legislature and won a majority of the elections held to select delegates for the convention held to debate ratification of the Constitution. Due to a dispute with a business partner, <mask> did not attend the ratification convention, which voted to ratify the Constitution in December 1787. By the end of 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by enough states to take effect. In September 1788, the Pennsylvania legislature elected <mask> and William Maclay, both of whom were aligned with the Federalists, as the state's first representatives in the United States Senate. U.S.Senator

In the country's first presidential election, Washington was elected as the President of the United States. Washington offered the position of Secretary of the Treasury to <mask>, but <mask> declined the offer, instead suggesting Alexander Hamilton for the position. In the Senate, <mask> pressed for many of the same policies he had sought as Superintendent of Finance: a federal tariff, a national bank, a federal mint, and the funding of the national debt. Congress agreed to implement the Tariff of 1789, which created a uniform impost on goods carried by foreign ships into American ports, but many other issues lingered into 1790. Among those issues were the site of the national capital and the fate of state debts. <mask> sought the return of the nation's capital to Philadelphia and the federal assumption of state debts. <mask> defeated Maclay's proposal to establish the capital in Pennsylvania at a site on the Susquehanna River located several miles west of Philadelphia, but James Madison defeated <mask>'s attempt to establish the capital just outside of Philadelphia.<mask>'s 1781 "Report On Public Credit" supplied the basis for Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit, which Hamilton submitted in 1790. Hamilton proposed to fully fund all federal debts and assume all state debts, and to pay for those debts by issuing new federal bonds. Hamilton argued that these measures would restore confidence in public credit and help to revitalize the economy, but opponents attacked his proposals as unfairly beneficial to the speculators who had purchased many of the government's debt certificates. <mask> supported Hamilton's economic proposals, but the two differed on the site of the federal capital, as Hamilton wanted to keep it in New York. In June 1790, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson convinced <mask>, Hamilton, and Madison to agree to a compromise in which the federal government assumed state debts, while a new federal capital would be established on the Potomac River; until construction of that capital was completed, Philadelphia would serve as the nation's temporary capital. With the backing of all four leaders, the Compromise of 1790, as it became known, was approved by Congress. That same year, <mask> and Maclay helped secure Pennsylvania's control of the Erie Triangle, which provided the state with access to the Great Lakes.In the early 1790s, the country became increasingly polarized between the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Jefferson and Madison, and the Federalist Party, led by Hamilton. Though <mask> was less focused on politics after the Compromise of 1790, he supported most of Hamilton's policies and aligned with the Federalist Party. <mask> especially supported Hamilton's proposal for the establishment of a national bank. Despite the opposition of Madison and other Southern leaders, Congress approved the establishment of the First Bank of the United States in 1791. While <mask> served in Congress, a new political elite emerged in Philadelphia. These new leaders generally respected <mask>, but most did not look to him for leadership. With <mask> playing little active role, they called a convention that revised the state constitution that included many of the alterations that <mask> had long favored, including a bicameral legislature, a state governor with the power to veto bills, and a judiciary with life tenure.Later business career

<mask> refocused on his trading concerns after leaving office as Superintendent of Finance, seeking especially to expand his role in the tobacco trade. He began suffering from financial problems in the late 1780s after a business partner mistakenly refused to honor bills issued by <mask>, causing him to default on a loan. In 1784 <mask> was part of a syndicate that backed the sailing of the Empress of China (1783) for the China trade. As part of the effort to repay France for loans that financed the war, <mask> contracted to supply 20,000 hogsheads of tobacco annually to France beginning in 1785. Shortly after these contracts were signed, Ambassador Thomas Jefferson took it upon himself to interfere with these arrangements and that brought about the collapse of the tobacco market. In 1787, <mask> was sued in Virginia by Carter Braxton for £28,257; the lawsuit continued for eight years before commissioners were appointed, then <mask> appealed. Finally Virginia's Court of Appeals led by Edmund Pendleton decided mostly in favor of Braxton before <mask> was forced into bankruptcy by his own continued land speculations (although <mask> as late as 1800 believed he should have won £20,000).<mask> became increasingly fixated on land speculation, reaching his first major real estate deal in 1790 when he acquired much of the Phelps and Gorham Purchase in western New York. He realized a substantial profit the following year when he sold the land to The Pulteney Association, a group of British land speculators led by Sir William Johnstone Pulteney. <mask> used the money from this sale to purchase the remainder of the Phelps and Gorham Purchase, then turned around and sold much of that land to the Holland Land Company, a group of Dutch land speculators. These early successes encouraged <mask> to pursue greater profits through increasingly large and risky land acquisitions. On March 7, 1791, <mask> obtained title to a lot from John Dickinson and wife; on March 9, 1793, the site was surveyed; it wasn't until 1794 he began construction of a mansion on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia designed by architect of Washington, D.C., Pierre Charles L'Enfant; it was to occupy an entire block between Chestnut Street and Walnut Street on the western edge of Philadelphia. The structure was of red brick and marble lining. Besides Land Speculation, <mask> founded several canal companies: [Similar to the Potomac Company], two Pennsylvania canal companies were set up to try to link the produce of the western lands with the eastern markets; they were the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company chartered September 29, 1791 and the Delaware and Schuylkill Canal Company chartered April 10, 1792, <mask> was president of both companies; he was also involved with a steam engine company, and launched a hot air balloon from his garden on Market Street.He had the first iron rolling mill in America. His icehouse was the model for one Washington installed at Mount Vernon. He backed the new Chestnut Street Theater, and had a greenhouse where his staff cultivated lemon trees. In early 1793, <mask> purchased shares in a land company led by John Nicholson, the comptroller general of Pennsylvania, beginning a deep business partnership between Nicholson and <mask>. Later in 1793, <mask>, Nicholson, and James Greenleaf jointly purchased thousands of lots in the recently established District of Columbia. They subsequently purchased millions of acres in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas; in each case, they went into debt to make the purchases, with the intent of quickly reselling the land to realize a profit. <mask> and his partners struggled to re-sell their lands, and Greenleaf dropped out from the partnership in 1795.<mask> realized a profit by selling his lots in the District of Columbia in 1796, but he and Nicholson still owed their creditors approximately $12 million (about $ in ). By Morris's own admission the beginning of his bankruptcy began with the failure of John Warder & Co. of Dublin and Donald and Burton of London in the spring of 1793. <mask> was deeply involved in land speculation, especially after the Revolutionary War; (See Phelps and Gorham Purchase of 1791 above); on April 22, 1794, <mask> entered into an association called the Asylum Company with John Nicholson, [who had served as Comptroller-General of the state of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1794] to purchase 1,000,000 acres of Pennsylvania land besides land they already had title to in Luzerne County; Northumberland County and Northampton County. [This was not the first partnership Morris and Nicholson were involved in; in 1792, Nicholson had negotiated the purchase from the federal government of the  tract known as the Erie Triangle. Along with an agent of the Holland Land Company, Aaron Burr, Robert <mask>, and other individual and institutional investors, he formed the Pennsylvania Population Company. This front organization purchased all 390 parcels of land in the Erie Triangle. Nicholson was impeached in 1794 for his role in the company.]However, <mask> severely overextended himself financially. He had borrowed to speculate in real estate in the new national capital, District of Columbia, but signed a contract with a syndicate of Philadelphia investors to take over his obligations there. After that, he took the options to purchase over  in the rural south. Unfortunately for <mask>, that syndicate reneged on their commitment, leaving him once again liable, but this time with more exposure. In 1795, <mask> and two of his partners, Greenleaf and Nicholson, pooled their land and formed a land company called the North American Land Company. The purpose of this company was to raise money by selling stock secured by the real estate [i.e. to finance their land speculation business].According to one historian of American land speculation, the NALC was "largest land trust ever known in America". The three partners turned over to the company land throughout the United States totaling more than , most of it valued at about 50 cents an acre. In addition to land in the District of Columbia, there were  in Georgia,  in Kentucky,  in North Carolina,  in Pennsylvania,  in South Carolina, and  in Virginia. NALC was authorized to issue 30,000 shares, each worth $100. To encourage investors to purchase shares, the three partners guaranteed that a 6 percent dividend would be paid every year. To ensure that there was enough money to pay this divided, each partner agreed to put 3,000 of their own NALC shares in escrow. Greenleaf, <mask>, and Nicholson were entitled to receive a 2.5 percent commission on any land the company sold.Greenleaf was named secretary of the new company. Other land speculations that <mask> was involved in was

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title: Robert Morris (financier)

texts:
 the Illinois-Wabash Company and the Georgia Yazoo Land Company

1796 lack of capital and Panic of 1797 and bankruptcy
The Washington DC Lots were not the only land problems for <mask>; he began losing everything for nonpayment on interest on loans and taxes: In May 1796, John Barker Church accepted a mortgage on another 100,000 acres of the Morris Reserve in present-day Allegany County and Genesee County, against a debt owed to him by <mask>. After <mask> failed to pay the mortgage, Church foreclosed, and Church's son Philip Schuyler Church acquired the land in May 1800. Philip began the settlement of Allegany and Genesee counties by founding the village of Angelica, New York. In a letter of September 1797 to his partner Nicholson, <mask> begged to be able to find $500.00 to pay two years wages to his servant Mr. Richard; in a subsequent letter October 25, 1797 to Nicholson, <mask> moaned that 200,000 acres of North Carolina land which had cost him $27,000.00 had been sold for one year's taxes. In regard to <mask>'s Philadelphia mansion L'Enfant was paid $9,037.13 between December 1795 and January 1799. Despite the spent amount of £6138 5s 10d it was never completed.The bank of Pennsylvania brought suit against him and a judgement made against him for $20,997.40; an execution against his unfinished Chestnut Street "Morris Folly" mansion was issued in September 1797 to Philadelphia Sherriff Baker; Sherriff Penrose on December 11, 1797, made deed-poll to William Sansom for the building and the lot sold for $25,600 subject to a £7,000 in specie mortgage payable to Messrs Willink of Amsterdam. The last credit for the house was July 2, 1801 and the last charge for it was made July 9, 1801. The unfinished mansion became known as "<mask>'s folly", and the land eventually became Sansom Street. Marble from this house was purchased by Latrobe; he used it to adorn buildings and monuments from Rhode Island to Charlestown, South Carolina. The two canal companies had also failed as well: for example after its incorporation the Schuylkill and Susquehanna was subscribed for 40,000 shares—but only 1000 shares were sold; the Delaware and Schuylkill company was to have been 2000 shares at $200.00 a share. Operations were suspended because "..Either on account of errors in plans adopted, failure to procure the necessary means, financial convulsions, or a combination of all these difficulties, they were compelled to suspend their operations after an outlay of $440,000, which was an immense sum in those days..". When England and the Dutch declared war on Revolutionary France, an expected loan from Holland never materialized.The subsequent Napoleonic Wars ruined the market for American land and Morris's highly leveraged company collapsed. Lastly, the financial markets of England, the United States, and the Caribbean suffered from deflation related with the Panic of 1797. <mask> was left "land rich and cash poor". He owned more land than any other American at any time, but didn't have enough liquid capital to pay his creditors. Among his creditors was his son-in-law James Marshall for £20,000 sterling; likewise his brother-in-law Bishop White was also a creditor to <mask> for $3,000. Gouvenor <mask> was owned $24,000 "..exclusive of what he paid in Europe on my account, the amount of which I do not know. "; Henry Lee III was a creditor for protested bills for $39,446 plus damages and interest; <mask>'s wife Mary had a sum of credit of $15,860.16 from the sale of two farms left to her by her father;his daughter <mask> had a credit of a few hundred pounds left to her by her grandmother received by <mask>; as <mask> had given her on her marriage nothing but clothes and old wine he assigned to her two quarter chests of tea which he sent to Alexandria, Virginia for sale although he feared this would not amount to principal and interest; his son <mask> Jr was a debtor for sums spent in Europe without his father's knowledge; his son Charles while under age had contracted bills without his father's knowledge for $144.94 for a tailor and $24.50 for a shoemaker.The NALC encountered financial difficulty almost immediately. Only  of land was turned over to the NALC, which meant it could issue only 22,365 shares. This meant only 7,455 shares were put into escrow (instead of the required 9,000). Rather than paying creditors with cash, the NALC paid them with shares (8,477 shares in 1795 and 1796). On May 15, 1795, the D.C. commissioners demanded their first payment from Greenleaf, <mask>, and Nicholson, for the 6,000 lots purchased in 1793. But Greenleaf had misappropriated some of the company's income to pay his own debts. Without the Dutch mortgage income and missing funds, there was no money to make the payment to the commissioners.Furthermore, Greenleaf had co-signed for loans taken out by <mask> and Nicholson. When these men defaulted, creditors sought out Greenleaf to make good on the debts—which he could not. Moris and his partners had failed to both pay the instalments on the Washington D.C. building lots and finished building twenty houses (they had contracted ten houses annually for seven years on said lots); On July 10, 1795, <mask> and Nicholson bought out Greenleaf's interest in the December 24, 1793, agreement. The commissioners began legal proceedings to regain title to the 6,000 lots owned by NALC and the 1,115.25 lots owned by Greenleaf personally. The worsening financial problems of Greenleaf, <mask>, and Nicholson led to increasingly poor personal relations among the three men. Nicholson, particularly bitter, began making public accusations against Greenleaf in print. <mask> attempted to mediate between the two men, but his efforts failed.In an attempt to resolve his financial problems, Greenleaf sold his shares in the NALC to Nicholson and Morris on May 28, 1796, for $1.5 million. Unfortunately, Morris and Nicholson funded their purchase by giving Greenleaf personal notes. Furthermore, they endorsed one another's notes. Morris and Nicholson, themselves nearly bankrupt, agreed to pay one-quarter of the purchase price every year for the next four years. Greenleaf's shares were not to be transferred to Morris and Nicholson until the fourth payment was received. On September 30, 1796, James Greenleaf put 7,455 of his NALC shares in a trust (known as the "391 trust" because it was recorded on page 391 of the firm's accounting book). The "391 trust" was created to generate income (from the 6 percent dividend) to pay a loan given to Greenleaf by Edward Fox.A trustee was assigned to hold on to the shares. The same day, Greenleaf put 2,545 shares into another trust (the "381 trust"), as a guarantee against nonpayment of the dividend by Morris and Nicholson. Morris and Nicholson's made the first payment to Greenleaf for the one-third interest in the NALC by turning over title to several hundred lots in Washington, D.C. On March 8, 1797, Greenleaf executed the 381 trust. When the NALC did not issue its 6 percent dividend, Greenleaf transferred one-third of the shares in the "391 trust" to the trustees. The total number of shares transferred to the "381 trust" trustees was now 6,119. On June 24, 1797, Morris, Greenleaf and Nicholson had conveyed their Washington D.C. Lots in trust to Henry Pratt and others in payments of their debts. Poor business practices were now dragging down NALC.For years, <mask> and Nicholson had acted as personal guarantors for one another's notes. Now many of these notes were coming due, and neither man could pay them. Creditors began selling the notes publicly, often at heavy discounts. By 1798, Morris and Nicholson's $10 million in personal notes were trading at one-eighth their face value. NALC also discovered that some of titles to the  of land it owned were not clear, and thus the land could not be used for security. In other cases, NALC found it had been swindled, and the rich land it thought it owned turned out to be barren and worthless. <mask> and Nicholson honestly believed that, if their cash flow problems were fixed, they could make payments on the property they owned and their shares would be returned to them.This proved incorrect. On October 23, 1807, all stock in the company was sold at 7 cents on the dollar to the accountants managing the Aggregate Fund. In 1856, the Trustees of the North American Land Company held $92,071.87. Morris and Nicholson's heirs sued to recover the stock and gain access to the income. The North American Land Company stayed in existence until 1872. An 1880 auditors report called the litigation "phenomenal ... the counsel for Morris and Nickerson pursued the fund for twenty-five years, seeking to obtain it from the trustees of the North American Company and the trusts which had been created from it, and also defending the money from the State in an attempt to sequestrate it. After all counsel fees and expenses, the amount available for division to the Morris interest was $9,692.49."In 1797 <mask> conveyed his household furniture to Thomas Fitzsimmons which was sold at public auction. What was left was lent to Mrs. <mask> by Fitzsimmons and <mask> son-in-law Marshall; all <mask> had left in his house was some bedding, clothing, part of a quarter cask of wine; part of a barrel of flour, some coffee, a little sugar and some bottled wine which was the remainder from a cask he had given to his daughter Maria. <mask> attempted to avoid creditors by staying outside the city at his country estate "The Hills", located on the Schuylkill River, but his creditors literally pursued him to his gate. <mask> was sued by a former partner, James Greenleaf, who had been imprisoned for fraud and was serving time in debtors' prison. Unable to dodge his creditors and their lawyers, <mask> was finally arrested. He was imprisoned for debt in Prune Street prison in Philadelphia from February 1798 to August 1801. <mask> property Summerseat (Morrisville, Pennsylvania) would be sold in a Sherriff's sale on June 9, 1798, to George Clymer and Thomas Fitzsimmons for $41,000.00.In January 1799 <mask> lamented to Nicholson of how a London firm had refused to accept his bill of lading £389 sterling "..because the money in the hands of the party upon whom the bill was drawn had been attached by the owner of a bond given for payment of some lands in Georgia..". 43 of the 100 acres of <mask> estate "The Hills" was purchased in March 1799 by Henry Pratt for $14,654.00 for his country house Lemon Hill after the tearing down of <mask>'s old mansion; in turn the "Lemon Hill" estate became part of the foundation for Fairmount Park Philadelphia; one part of Morris property which had also been purchased in 1799 by William Cannard became part of the Sedgeley mansion-which in turn ironically became part of Fairmont Park. Of his partners Geenleaf was released after being declared bankrupt in 1798; Nicholson died in prison in 1800. Final years

<mask> was unable to pay his debts, and he remained in debtors' prison for three and a half years. <mask> was released from prison in August 1801 after Congress passed its first bankruptcy legislation, the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 in part to get <mask> out of prison. At the time of his release, three commissioners found that he had debts of $2,948,711.11; the proceedings were certified October 15, 1801 after 2/3 of his creditors agreed to the discharge of <mask>; on December 4, 1801, a certificate of bankruptcy was confirmed. but he remained financially destitute.Gouverneur <mask>, who served as <mask>'s representative to the Holland Land Company, was able to attach a provision to the sale of some land that gave <mask> a $1,500 () per year annuity; this annuity allowed Mary to rent a small house in Philadelphia far away from the city's center. Ironically one of the few assets <mask> had left to him was his father's old worn out gold watch which he had inherited at the start of his career; <mask> managed to leave this timepiece in his Will to his son <mask>. <mask> died on May 8, 1806, in Philadelphia. No public ceremonies marked his death. He was buried in the churchyard of Christ Church. Legacy

Historical reputation

Biographer Charles Rappleye writes that <mask> "was too rich to be a folk hero, and the ultimate failure of his personal fortune robbed him of any Midas-like mystique." Some historians have largely ignored <mask>'s role in founding the United States, while others regard him as the leader of a conservative, anti-democratic faction of the Founding Fathers. <mask>. Wright and David J. Cowen describe <mask> as a "fallen angel" who "almost single-handedly financed the final years" of the American Revolution before falling into "ignominy" for defaulting on his debts.Historian William Hogeland writes "given his seminal performance to victory in the Revolution, as well as to forming the nation, <mask> isn't as well known by Americans as he ought to be." Memorials

<mask>'s portrait appeared on US$1,000 notes from 1862 to 1863 and on the $10 silver certificate from 1878 to 1880. Institutions named in honor of <mask> include Robert Morris University and Robert Morris University Illinois. Mount Morris, New York, the location of a large flood control dam on the Genesee River, is named in his honor. A number of ships in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard have been named USS Morris or USRC Morris for him. Morrisville, Pennsylvania, was named in his honor. The Morris-Taney-class cutter was named for <mask> and Roger Taney.A statue of <mask> stands at Independence National Historical Park, and a monument to <mask>, Washington, and Haym Salomon stands at Heald Square in Chicago, Illinois. Summerseat, <mask>'s former estate in Morrisville, is listed as a National Historic Landmark. Lemon Hill, a Federal-style estate listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located on a parcel of land formerly owned by <mask>. Part of the Liberty Bell Center is on land that was formerly part of the estate known as the President's House. <mask> holds the curious distinction as the only Founding Father whose house is a national memorial, but his life is not interpreted at the site. <mask> is included in the Washington, D.C. Memorial to the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence. See also
 List of richest Americans in history
 List of United States senators born outside the United States

Notes

References

Bibliography

 Ferguson, E. James.Business, Government, and Congressional Investigation in the Revolution, (1959), Via Jstor
 Ferguson, E. James. The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (1961)

 Perkins, Edwin J. American public finance and financial services, 1700–1815 (1994). pp. 85–105 on Revolution, pp. 106–36 on postwar. Complete text line free

 Smith, Ryan K. <mask>'s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.Ver Steeg, Clarence L. <mask>, Revolutionary Financier. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954. Ver Steeg, Clarence L. "<mask>, <mask>" in American National Biography Online 2000. Primary sources
 Ferguson, E. James (editor): The Papers of Robert Morris 1781–1784 (9 volumes): University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978; (1995 reprint: ). External links

 Biography by Rev. Charles A. Goodrich, 1856
 The President's House

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1734 births
1806 deaths
Politicians from Liverpool
Businesspeople from Liverpool
British emigrants to the Thirteen Colonies
American people of English descent
American Episcopalians
Marshall family
Continental Congressmen from Pennsylvania
Signers of the United States Declaration of Independence
Signers of the Articles of Confederation
Signers of the United States Constitution
Pro-Administration Party United States senators from Pennsylvania
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Members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives
Politicians from Philadelphia
American bankers
American merchants
American slave traders
Central bankers
Colonial American merchants
Financiers of the American Revolution
History of banking
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Burials at Christ Church, Philadelphia
Members of the American

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title: Steve Wright (serial killer)

texts:
<mask> (born 24 April 1958) is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswich Ripper. He is serving life imprisonment for the murder of five prostitutes who worked in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006, and <mask> was found guilty in February 2008. Early life
<mask> was born in the Norfolk village of Erpingham, the second of four children of military policeman Conrad and veterinary nurse Patricia, on 24 April 1958. He has an older brother and two younger sisters. While <mask>'s father was on military service, the family had lived in both Malta and Singapore. <mask>'s mother left the family in 1964 when he was aged 6; his father divorced his mother in 1978; both remarried.<mask> and his siblings lived with their father, who fathered a son and a daughter with his second wife, Valerie. <mask> left school at the age of 16 in 1974, and soon afterwards joined the Merchant Navy, becoming a chef on ferries sailing from Felixstowe, Suffolk. In 1978, at age 20, he married Angela O'Donovan in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. They had a son, Michael. The couple separated in 1987, and later divorced. <mask> became a steward on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, a lorry driver, a barman and, just prior to his arrest, a forklift truck driver. Former prostitute Lindi St Clair said that <mask> attacked her in the 1980s.His second marriage was to 32 year old Diane Cassell at Braintree, Essex, register office in August 1987. They divorced in July 1988 while he was a pub landlord in Norwich. It was during this time that <mask> also managed a pub in South London. He lost this post due to his gambling and heavy drinking. <mask> was convicted in 2001 of theft, having stolen £80 to pay off his debts. This was his only criminal conviction prior to the murders. <mask> accrued large gambling debts, and was declared bankrupt in the late 1990s.He had twice tried to commit suicide, first by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car in 1994; secondly in 2000, by an overdose of pills. Suffolk murders

<mask> met <mask> (no relation) in 2001 in Felixstowe, and they moved to a house in Ipswich together in 2004. <mask> had always admitted that he patronized prostitutes, and had done so since he was in the Merchant Navy, and continually throughout his life. In Ipswich, he admitted he went to certain massage and sauna establishments that were actually brothels. During his trial, <mask> stated he had patronized professional prostitutes on many occasions, including three of the murder victims. <mask> began having sex with prostitutes again when his partner began working night shifts and their sex life became almost non-existent; he paid at least a dozen women for sex in the final three months of 2006. Local prostitutes nicknamed him "Mondeo Man" and "Silver-Backed Gorilla", because of his hair colour and stocky build.Between 30 October and 10 December 2006, <mask> murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich. Forensic evidence led to his arrest on 19 December; tiny flecks of blood were found on the back seats of <mask>'s Ford Mondeo, and partially matched the DNA profile of murder victim Paula Clennell. <mask> was found guilty of all five murders on 21 February 2008. At Ipswich Crown Court the following day, Mr Justice Gross sentenced <mask> to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he should never be released. On 19 March 2008, <mask> appealed his convictions, but on 2 February 2009, it was announced that <mask> had decided to drop his appeal. Possible links to other crimes
<mask> is still being investigated in connection with other unsolved murders and disappearances. Experts have highlighted how it is unlikely for any serial killer to start killing at such a late stage (<mask> was nearly in his 50s when the 2006 murders were committed), and that serial killers almost always start killing before their mid 30s.This indicates that <mask> likely killed before in his life, and psychologists told police after the murders that it was 'highly likely' that he had done so. <mask> is one of a number of high-profile murderers or sex offenders to have been identified as possible suspects in the Suzy Lamplugh murder case; he had worked with Lamplugh on Queen Elizabeth 2 during the early 1980s. Lamplugh went missing in London in July 1986, and was legally declared dead in 1994, but her body has never been found. However, the Metropolitan Police have stated that this is not a strong line of enquiry. In 2002, the police named John Cannan as the man they believed killed Lamplugh. Cleveland Police have not ruled out a link between <mask> and the murder of Vicky Glass, a heroin addict who vanished from Middlesbrough in September 2000, and whose naked body was later found in a brook on the North York Moors. In 2019, <mask> was linked by an ex-police officer to the murder of Jeanette Kempton in 1989.Kempton had vanished from Brixton, near where <mask> lived at the time, and was later found dead many miles away in a rural location in Suffolk. In July 2021 <mask> was arrested, at HM Prison Long Lartin, on suspicion of murdering Victoria Hall, a 17-year-old who was murdered on her way home from a Suffolk nightclub in 1999. Her body was found in a ditch five days after she was last seen alive in Felixstowe. Suffolk police reopened their investigation in 2019 after receiving fresh witness information. They announced that <mask> had been “released under investigation, pending further inquiries”. Only two months after this police announced a re-investigation by a historical crimes unit into Vicky Glass's murder in order to pursue "new lines of enquiry". Previous East Anglia prostitute murders

<mask> has also been linked to the murders of other sex workers in Ipswich and nearby Norwich.When investigating the five murders committed by <mask> in Ipswich in late 2006, criminologist David Wilson, who was personally involved in the case, stated that he felt that the murders were far too practised for someone murdering for the first time. There was a cluster of sex worker murders in Norwich in the years before the 2006 murders, which have gone unsolved to this day. <mask> used to live and work in the city, and he frequently returned to the city in the years after he left, usually travelling from Ipswich to Norwich once a month. He ran a pub in the middle of the red light district of Norwich, similar to how he lived in the centre of the red light district of Ipswich at the time of the 2006 murders. <mask> has been linked to the unsolved murders of:
 Natalie Pearman, Norwich, November 1992 (link disproven by 2017)
 Amanda Duncan, Ipswich, July 1993
 Kellie Pratt, Norwich, June 2000
 Michelle Bettles, Norwich, March 2002

In June 2012, Wilson said that the killer of Norwich sex worker Michelle Bettles was likely <mask>. Bettles was strangled in March 2002, and her body was found three days later in woodland by a lane on the outskirts of the city. The police responded to the suggested links between Bettles's case and <mask> by saying that they had found no evidence linking <mask> to the crime.It was revealed in 2019 that police had already made an arrest in April 2003 of a man whose DNA matched samples from Bettles' body, and this man admitted having picked her up for sex on 26 March 2002, two days before she was last seen. The man claimed that he was at home with a migraine on the night she was killed, but phone records show him making a large amounts of calls that evening, although police failed to locate where the calls were made from. <mask> had also been linked by criminal experts to the unsolved murder of Norwich sex worker Natalie Pearman in November 1992. Pearman was last seen at night soliciting clients outside the Ferry Boat Inn pub – the pub that was owned and run by <mask> and that was located in the heart of the city's red light district. The police cross-referenced the DNA found on Pearman's body in 1992 to <mask>'s, but the results were "inconclusive". However, in 2017, police announced that they had a full DNA profile of the attacker and that solving the case was simply a matter of matching the DNA to an individual, meaning that <mask> could be ruled out of the murder. Ipswich sex worker Amanda Duncan vanished after talking to a man in a car on Portman Road in the town in 1993, a road that <mask> was known to acquire his prostitutes from, and from where some of his victims were known to have disappeared from in 2006.After <mask>'s murders in 2006, the police re-opened and re-examined these four cold cases to establish whether <mask> could be responsible, and questioned <mask> about them. Family members of the victims stated they believed he could be linked and called for the police to investigate this further and charge him for them. See also
List of serial killers by country
List of serial killers by number of victims
Alun Kyte (Midlands Ripper)

References

External links
Ipswich serial killer <mask>, ITV Local

1958 births
Living people
21st-century English criminals
British Merchant Navy personnel
British people convicted of theft
Criminals from Norfolk
English male criminals
English people convicted of murder
English prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment
English serial killers
Male serial killers
People convicted of murder by England and Wales
People from Ipswich
People from Erpingham
Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by England and Wales
Criminals from Suffolk

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Steven Gerald James Wright
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title: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

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Dame <mask>,  (9 December 19153 August 2006) was a German-born Austro-British soprano. She was among the foremost singers of lieder, and is renowned for her performances of Viennese operetta, as well as the operas of Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. After retiring from the stage, she was a voice teacher internationally. She is considered one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. Early life
<mask> was born on 9 December 1915 in Jarotschin in the Province of Posen in Prussia, Germany (now Poland) to <mask> and his wife, <mask> (). Schwarzkopf performed in her first opera in 1928, as Eurydice in a school production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in Magdeburg, Germany. In 1934, Schwarzkopf began her musical studies at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, where her singing tutor, Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, attempted to train her to be a mezzo-soprano.Schwarzkopf later trained under Maria Ivogün, and in 1938 joined the Deutsche Oper. Early career

In 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, <mask>'s father, a local school headmaster, was dismissed from his position by the new ruling authorities for having refused to allow a Nazi party meeting at his school. He was also banned from taking any new teaching post. Until <mask>'s dismissal, the probability was that the 17-year-old <mask> would have studied medicine after passing her Abitur; but now, as the daughter of a banned schoolteacher, she was not allowed to enter university and she commenced music studies at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Schwarzkopf made her professional debut at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (then called Deutsches Opernhaus) on 15 April 1938, as the Second Flower Maiden (First Group) in act 2 of Richard Wagner's Parsifal. In 1940 Schwarzkopf was awarded a full contract with the Deutsches Opernhaus, a condition of which was that she had to join the Nazi party. Since the theme was brought up in the dissertation of the Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb in 1982, the question of Schwarzkopf's relationship with the Nazi Party has been discussed repeatedly in the media and in literature.There was criticism that Schwarzkopf, not only in the years immediately after the war but also in confrontation with revelations made in the 1980s and 1990s made contradictory statements, including in regard to her membership in the NSDAP (Member No. 7,548,960). At first, she denied this and then with varying explanations defended it. In one version, for example, she claimed that she joined the party only at the insistence of her father who, himself, had earlier lost his position as school principal after forbidding a Nazi program in the school. Further publications discussed her musical performances during the war before Nazi party conferences and for units of the Waffen-SS. Her defenders argue in favor of her claim that she always strictly separated art from politics and that she was a non-political person. In 1942, she was invited to sing with the Vienna State Opera, where her roles included Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Musetta and later Mimì in Puccini's La bohème and Violetta in Verdi's La traviata.Schwarzkopf starred in five feature films for Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, in which she acted, sang and played the piano. Post-war career

In 1945, Schwarzkopf was granted Austrian citizenship to enable her to sing in the Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper). In 1947 and 1948, Schwarzkopf appeared on tour with the Vienna State Opera at London's Royal Opera House at Covent Garden on 16 September 1947 as Donna Elvira in Mozart's Don Giovanni and at La Scala on 28 December 1948, as the Countess in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which became one of her signature roles. Schwarzkopf later made her official debut at the Royal Opera House on 16 January 1948, as Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute, in performances sung in English, and at La Scala on 29 June 1950 singing Beethoven's Missa solemnis. Schwarzkopf's association with the Milanese house in the early 1950s gave her the opportunity to sing certain roles on stage for the only time in her career: Mélisande in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Iole in Handel's Hercules, Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin, as well as her first Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and her first Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte at the Piccola Scala. On 11 September 1951, she appeared as Anne Trulove in the world premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. <mask> made her American concert debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on October 28 and 29, 1954, in Strauss's Four Last Songs and the closing scene from Capriccio with Fritz Reiner conducting; her Carnegie Hall debut was a Lieder recital on 25 November 1956; her American opera debut was with the San Francisco Opera on 20 September 1955 as the Marschallin, and her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 13 October 1964, also as the Marschallin.In March 1946, <mask> was invited to audition for Walter Legge, an influential British classical record producer and a founder of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Legge asked her to sing Hugo Wolf's lied Wer rief dich denn? and, impressed, signed her to an exclusive contract with EMI. They began a close partnership and Legge subsequently became Schwarzkopf's manager and companion. They were married on 19 October 1953 in Epsom, Surrey; Schwarzkopf thus acquired British citizenship by marriage. <mask> would divide her time between lieder recitals and opera performances for the rest of her career. When invited in 1958 to select her eight favourite records on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, Schwarzkopf chose seven of her own recordings, and an eighth of Karajan conducting the Rosenkavalier prelude, as they evoked fond memories of the people she had worked with.In the 1960s, Schwarzkopf concentrated nearly exclusively on five operatic roles: Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, Countess Madeleine in Strauss's Capriccio, and the Marschallin. She was also well received as Alice Ford in Verdi's Falstaff. However, on the EMI label she made several "champagne operetta" recordings like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow and Johann Strauss II's The Gypsy Baron. Schwarzkopf's last operatic performance was as the Marschallin on 31 December 1971, in the theatre of La Monnaie in Brussels. For the next several years, she devoted herself exclusively to lieder recitals. On 17 March 1979, Walter Legge suffered a severe heart attack. He disregarded doctor's orders to rest and attended Schwarzkopf's final recital two days later in Zurich.Three days later, he died. Retirement and death

After retiring (almost immediately after her husband's death), Schwarzkopf taught and gave master classes around the world, notably at the Juilliard School in New York City. After living in Switzerland for many years, she took up residence in Austria. She was made a doctor of music by the University of Cambridge in 1976, and became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1992. <mask> died in her sleep during the night of 2–3 August 2006 at her home in Schruns, Vorarlberg, Austria, aged 90. Her ashes, and those of Walter Legge, were buried next to her parents in Zumikon near Zürich, where she had lived from 1982 to 2003. Legacy
Her discography is considerable both in quality and in quantity and is distinguished for her Mozart and Richard Strauss operatic portrayals, her two commercial recordings of Strauss's Four Last Songs and her recordings of lieder, especially those of Wolf.<mask> is generally considered to have been the greatest German lyric soprano of the twentieth century and one of the finest Mozart singers of all time with an "indescribably beautiful" voice. <mask>'s entry in The Grove Book of Opera Singers concludes: "Although she dismissed her [Nazi Party] membership as a professional necessity, her reputation has remained tarnished by what seems to have been an active party membership." Awards

 1950: Lilli Lehmann Medal, Mozarteum International Foundation, Salzburg
 1959: 1. "Orfeo d'Oro", Mantua (?) 1969: Orphée d'or recording award from the Académie du disque lyrique in Paris
 1961: Edison Award, Amsterdam
 1961: Awarded the title Deutsche Kammersängerin
 1964: Honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music
 1967: Stockholm television award for best European soprano Stockholmer
 1971: Hugo-Wolf Medal
 1974: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
 1982: Mozart Medal of the city of Frankfurt am Main
 1983: Honorary member of the Vienna State Opera and title of Kammersängerin
 1986: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
 1991: UNESCO Mozart Medal
 1992: Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to music
 2002:
 2012: Voted into Gramophone Hall of Fame

Quotations

 (After being asked about Peter Sellars) "There are names I do not want mentioned in my home. Do not say that name in my presence. I have seen what he has done, and it is criminal.As my husband used to say, so far no one has dared go into the Louvre Museum to spray graffiti on the Mona Lisa, but some opera directors are spraying graffiti over masterpieces." – Newsweek interview, 15 October 1990
 "Many composers today don't know what the human throat is. At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick." – Newsweek interview, 15 October 1990
 (Asked in 1995 if she would sing in the cultural climate of the 1990s if she were much younger) "It's a kind of prostitution now. There is nobody I envy. There's a disintegration of integrity in our profession."Recordings

Recital at Carnegie Hall (1956), EMI in "Great Performances of the Century", 1989

Bach
 St Matthew Passion (Klemperer), Philharmonia Orchestra (Warner Classics 1961)
Brahms
 A German Requiem (Klemperer), Philharmonia Orchestra (Warner Classics 1961)
Humperdinck
 Hänsel und Gretel (Karajan) (1953) Naxos 8.110897-98
Lehár
 Das Land des Lächelns (Ackermann) (1953) and excerpts from Lehár Operettas Naxos 8.111016-17
 Die lustige Witwe (Kunz, Gedda) (1953) Naxos 8.111007
Mozart
 Don Giovanni (Carlo Maria Giulini, Philharmonia Orchestra) (Warner Classics 1959) with Joan Sutherland as Donna Anna. Le nozze di Figaro (Carlo Maria Giulini, Philharmonia Orchestra) (Warner Classics 1959)
 Così fan tutte (Otto, Karajan) (1954) Naxos 8.111232-34
 Die Zauberflöte (Otto Klemperer) (1960) (EMI 5673852). She plays the First Lady. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Rudolf Moralt) (1949) (Gala GL100.501)
Puccini
Turandot as Liù (Tullio Serafin, La Scala Orchestra; 1957 EMI Classics) Callas as Turandot
Johann Strauss II
 Die Fledermaus (Gedda, Karajan) (1955) Naxos 8.111036-37
Der Zigeunerbaron (Gedda, Prey, Kunz) (1954 Otto Ackermann, Philharmonia Orchestra & Chorus) EMI Classics 67535 ADD monaural 2CDs: 56:00, 44:11
Richard Strauss
 Der Rosenkavalier (Herbert von Karajan) (1956) (EMI 77357)  The Marschallin was considered her signature-role. Four Last Songs / Arabella (highlights) (Ackermann, Matacic) (1953, 1954) Naxos 8.111145
 Four Last Songs (Szell; 1965; Warner Classics "Great Recordings of the Century"; Cat: 0724356696020)
 Ariadne auf Naxos (Streich, Karajan) (1954) Naxos 8.111033-34
 Capriccio (Christa Ludwig, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Nicolai Gedda, Wolfgang Sawallisch) (1957) Warner Classics CDS 7 49014-8

Verdi
 Messa da Requiem (Di Stefano, De Sabata) (1954) Naxos 8.111049-50
Richard Wagner
 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Karajan) (1951) Naxos 8.110872-75

Video
She can be seen in two videotaped performances as the Marschallin:
 Schwarzkopf Seefried Fischer-Dieskau, a black-and-white DVD of these three singers. Schwarzkopf performs the Act I Finale from Der Rosenkavalier, from a performance filmed in London, 1961. Published by Warner Classics, Catalog number DVB 4904429.Der Rosenkavalier: the Film, a color videotape/DVD of a full length performance conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from the 1961 Salzburg Festival, featuring Sena Jurinac, Anneliese Rothenberger, Otto Edelmann and Erich Kunz; film directed by Paul Czinner. Published by KULTUR. ASIN: B0043988GM. Notes and references

Further reading
 Jefferson, <mask> Schwarzkopf Northeastern University Press (August 1996)  Chapter One extract
 Legge, Walter; postscript by <mask>, <mask>; ed. Sanders, Alan Walter Legge: Words and Music Routledge (1998)
 Liese, Kirsten, <mask>pf. From Flower Maiden To Marschallin. English translation: Charles Scribner.Molden, Vienna 2007. ; Amadeus Press, New York, 2009.

masks: Olga Maria Elisabeth Friederike Schwarzkopf


title: Mary Leadbeater

texts:
<mask> (; December 1758 – 27 June 1826) was an Irish author and diarist. Early years and education
Leadbeater was born in Ballitore, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland. She was the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–1792) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton, and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents were Quakers. She was thoroughly educated, and her literary studies were aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man of great ability who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784 she travelled to London with her father and paid several visits to Burke's town house, where she met Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also went to Beaconsfield, and on her return wrote a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which was acknowledged by Burke, 13 December 1784, in a long and eulogistic letter.On her way home she visited, at Selby, Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she described in her journal. Career
In 1791 she married <mask>, a former pupil of her father, and they resided in Ballitore. Leadbeater, who traced his descent from the Huguenot family of Le Batre, was a small farmer and landowner, and his wife kept the village post office. They had six children among them Lydia Fisher, <mask>, Margaret and Sarah who married John Barrington a member of the Quaker family who made candles and soap. On her father's death, Leadbeater received a tender letter of consolation from Burke. She had from time to time written poems, and in 1794 published anonymously in Dublin Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, which begins with "some account of the society of the people call Quakers", contains several poems on secular subjects, and concludes with "divine odes". She was in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 when the news arrived that the French fleet had been seen off Bantry, and she describes the march out of the troops.On 28 May 1797 Burke wrote one of his last letters to her. Ballitore was occupied in 1798 first by yeomanry,  "from whose bosom," wrote <mask>, "pity seemed banished." Next came the quartering of soldiers on the town, the Suffolk Fencibles and the Ancient Britons, who commenced torturing and flogging the inhabitants. "The village, once so peaceful, exhibited a scene of tumult and dismay; and the air rang with the shrieks of the sufferers, and the lamentations of those who beheld them suffer," she wrote. A force of about 300 rebels then occupied the town and carried out reprisals, but who fled the following day on the approach of a force of soldiers. These soldiers in turn exacted reprisals on the locals, even killing the local doctor, Johnston. <mask>er wrote of the killing of her friend: "He was alone and unarmed when seized, and I believe had never raised his hand to injure any one."The soldiers sacked the town, burned many houses and smashed up the rest, and one of them almost killed <mask>, who had to flee with a number of other women. In 1808 she published Poems with a metrical version of her husband's prose translation of Maffæus Vegio's Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. The poems are sixty-seven in number; six are on subjects relating to Burke, one in praise of the spa of Ballitore, and the remainder on domestic and local subjects. She next published in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, had appeared by 1813. The dialogues are on such subjects as dress, a wake, going to the fair, a spinning match, cow-pock, cookery, and matrimony. William P. Le Fanu (1774–1817) had suggested the design, and the object was to diffuse information about the peasantry. In 1813 she tried to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord's Friend.Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brought out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a curious moral play, Honesty is the best policy. In 1822 she concluded this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Loch Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter was also issued in 1822 (new edition. 1849, edited by Lydia Ann Barclay).Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appeared in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work was The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824. Besides receiving letters from Burke, Leadbeater corresponded with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Mrs Melesina Trench, and from the age of eleven kept a private journal. She died at Ballitore 27 June 1826, and was buried in the Quaker burial-ground there. She had several children, and one of her daughters, Mrs. Fisher, was the intimate friend of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin. Leadbeater's best work, the Annals of Ballitore, was not printed till 1862, when it was brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a learned and patriotic printer, eager to preserve every truthful illustration of Irish life.It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and of the horrors of the outbreak itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe. References

Sources
 This entry lists:
 Smith, Joseph. A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books
 Webb, Alfred John (1878). A Compendium of Irish Biography, Dublin:Gill
 Memoirs of Mrs. Trench

External links

1758 births
1826 deaths
Irish diarists
People from County Kildare
Irish Quakers
18th-century Irish writers
Women diarists
18th-century Irish women writers
19th-century Irish women writers

masks:
Mary Leadbeater
William Leadbeater
Mary
Mary Leadbeater
Mary Leadbeat
Mary Leadbeater


title: Bruno Mégret

texts:
<mask> (; born 4 April 1949) is a French former nationalist politician. He was the leader of the Mouvement National Républicain political party, but retired in 2008 from all political action. Youth and studies
Born in Paris, <mask> studied at the École Polytechnique and at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, and is by profession a senior civil servant. He also holds a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of the armored cavalry school of Saumur, he is also a reserve army captain. <mask> was ranked 317th at the competition for entrance at École Polytechnique in 1969, and since at that time only 300 candidates were admitted every year, he could enter only because some students preferred to study at the slightly more prestigious École Normale Supérieure and turned down the École Polytechnique. However, at École Polytechnique he proved a very dedicated student, and was ranked 18th at the end of the studies.This enabled him to choose between the École des Mines and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées to finish his engineering studies. After graduating from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, he spent the academic year 1974–1975 in Berkeley, and obtained a Master of Science. He then returned to France to work for the Ministère de l'Équipement. The Club de l'Horloge
In 1975, he met Yvan Blot at the Commissariat Général du Plan, who invited him to join the Club de l'Horloge. At the Club de l'Horloge, he became friends with Jean-Claude Bardet and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, who with Yvan Blot were also members of the GRECE. In 1977, <mask> started to work as an engineer on highway construction, at the Direction Départementale de l'Équipement (DDE) of Essonne. During this period, he contributed to the publications of the Club de l'Horloge.In 1979, he became technical advisor to the minister of cooperation Robert Galley. He also joined  the Rassemblement pour la République (conservative political party) and was conservative candidate for legislative elections in 1981 against Michel Rocard in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. In 1981, after the defeat of the conservatives in legislative elections, finding the RPR too moderate, and realizing that not being a graduate from the École Nationale d'Administration like Jacques Toubon or Jean-François Mancel or Alain Juppé was slowing down his political career in the Rassemblement pour la République, he went on to create the Comités d'Action Républicaine (CAR). However, the appearance of the Front National at the European Parliament elections of 1984,  shattered the hopes of the CAR which did not even manage to have a list of candidates for these elections. In the National Front and the MNR
In 1985, <mask> joined Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front (FN, a nationalist political party). In 1986, he was elected to the French National Assembly, representing Isère. A rival of Jean-Pierre Stirbois, then general secretary of the FN (who died in 1988), he organised  Le Pen's election campaign in 1987 and became the number two (délégué général) in the movement.He was a member of the European Parliament for the FN from 1989 to 1999. In 1989, <mask> created the  Institut de formation nationale, the Centre d'études et d'argumentaires, the magazine Identité, the conseil scientifique and the publishing house Editions Nationales to elaborate the doctrine and diffuse the ideas of the Front National. His friends of the Club de l'Horloge Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Jean-Claude Bardet,  Yvan Blot and Jean-Jacques Mourreau of the CAR also secured key positions in the hierarchy of the Front National. However, the relationship between Le Pen and Mégret turned sour during the following decade. Mégret and others inside the Front started criticizing Le Pen's "extremist" positions, which, they argued, prevented the Front from obtaining political executive positions. Moreover, <mask> started to become very popular with the party members, winning large support against his rival <mask>, who had been made vice-president and general secretary of the Front National by Le Pen in 1995. On 9 February 1997 <mask>'s wife, Catherine Mégret, was elected mayor of Vitrolles.Following the social unrest of November–December 1995,  <mask> developed a strategy of creating new unions (FN-RATP, FN-TCL, FN-Poste, Mouvement pour une Education Nationale, FN-Police)  and professional organisations tied to the Front National to increase the audience of the party. This strategy contrasted sharply with the previous traditional anti-union stance of the Front National. In 1998, <mask> split from the Front National and founded, with his lover Jean-Yves Le Gallou, the Mouvement National Républicain. He received 2.33% of the vote in the first round of the 2002 French presidential election. <mask> endorsed Jean-Marie Le Pen in the runoff against Jacques Chirac. He also supported Le Pen in the 2007 presidential election. After he was sentenced to 8 months of probation, 8000 Euro fine and one-year ban from standing in any election for defalcation of public funds, he resigned in 2008 from the political field.He used money from the town Vitrolles to support his 2002 presidential run. In 2022 he voiced support for the candidacy of Éric Zemmour in the 2022 French presidential election, judging that Zemmour "embodies the right path for our ideas and for France". He criticised the leadership of Marine Le Pen for what Mégret perceives to be the "de-demonization and then standardization" of the Rassemblement National, judging her to have 'eroded' the party's firm stance on issues relating to security and identity. Political career
Electoral mandates

Member of the National Assembly of France for Isère : 1986–1988

Member of European Parliament : 1989–1999

Regional councillor of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur : 1992–2001

Municipal councillor of Marseille : 2002–2008

Political function

President of the National Republican Movement : 1998–2008

References

External links
 <mask>gret's official website (in French)

Carrefour de l'horloge people
1949 births
Living people
Candidates in the 2002 French presidential election
National Rally (France) MEPs
Politicians from Paris
Politicians of the French Fifth Republic
École Polytechnique alumni
National Republican Movement politicians
French Roman Catholics
MEPs for France 1989–1994
MEPs for France 1994–1999
National Rally (France) politicians
New Right (Europe)
Reconquête politicians

masks:
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Méret
Bruno Méret
Bruno Méret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Gollnisch
Bruno Méret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Mégret
Bruno Mé


title: Mikhail Romadin

texts:
<mask>ich <mask> () (12 April 1940 – 3 January 2012) was a Russian painter, book illustrator, movie art designer and theater artist. He graduated from the All-Union State University of Cinematography. He is a third generation artist; his grandfather <mask>  was an artist and his father Nikolay, was a landscape artist and Academician

Life and career

Childhood
<mask> was born on 12 April 1940 in Moscow. His father, the landscape painter <mask>, was a student of   Falk,   Mashkov and   Konchalovsky. When Romadin  was thirteen he took lessons with Pavel Dmitrievich Korin, and it was at this point that he became attracted to less traditional types of art. He showed his experiments to Altman and Tyshler, and for a long time he was strongly influenced by the works of Picasso, Braque, Legér and other modernists, that he saw at the exhibition of French art that took place in Moscow in 1961. Career

<mask> went on as a young man to attend the Gerasimov University of Cinematography, which he considered to be the higher education institute that offered the most creative freedom to its students.There his best friends and fellow students were the poet Gennady Shpalikov and the director Andrei Tarkovsky. They met every day and between them were overflowing with creative ideas. Romadin thought up the flying machine made out of a sack that figures in Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev (1969), and in 1964 he worked as an artist on the film I am Twenty 1965 , which was directed by Marlen Khutsiev and written by Marlen Khutsiev and Gennady Shpalikov. He was then the production designer and creator of the style of Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), after which he went on to work as production designer on three of his friend Andrei Konchalovsky's films, The First Teacher (1964), The Story of Asya Klyachina (1967), and A Nest of Gentlefolk (1969). Andrei Tarkovsky about <mask>: "Romadin's character is hidden, forced deep inside. In his best works what often happens is that the outward characteristics of barely ordered dynamism and chaos that one perceives initially, melt imperceptibly into the appreciation of calm and noble form, silent and simple. As I see it, this principle contains the highest artistic quality.”

Book illustration

<mask> created illustrations from an early age, and over his life illustrated more than 200 books, including Ray Bradbury's R is for Rocket and The Magic Ring by Andrei Platonov, Tales by Leo Tolstoy, Lion with a white beard  by Tonino Guerra – M.<mask>'s close friend,  and more.Tonino Guerra about <mask>:"I used to visit <mask>din regularly. The apartment was full of books, furniture and precariously balanced objects here and there. I was quite worried that it could all collapse on top of me. The paintings, which show innumerable fighting soldiers,leaves and grass, need an empty expanse of walls. But I didn’t feel suffocated; I felt like an organic part of this labyrinth, in which I discovered fresh air and broad horizons. It’s at this point that you yearn for the quiet life that we are all losing, and which was so dear to him [Romadin]”

The intricacy of dense detail in Romadin's work is striking, and the viewer feels drawn to examine each detail individually; but <mask>'s realism is deceptive, and what we see is really closer to surrealism. He achieves this through a cinematic approach, employing close-ups, expressive angles, montage, and a cinematic compositional dynamism.As Romadin said, “A good painting is done from corner to corner, with equal ten-sion in every square centimetre.”

<mask>'s works have been exhibited in over 300 solo exhibitions worldwide, from Paris, Geneva and Berlin, to Dallas and Beijing. While taking part in these exhibitions Romadin used to cover entire rolls of paper measuring several metres each with drawings. One critic called him a “drawing machine”. The works of <mask> are in the collections of museums and private collections worldwide. Personal life
Parents

Father – <mask> <mask> (1903–1987) – famous Russian landscape artist and Academician. Mother – Nina Gerasimovna <mask> (Shpileva)

Wife

Ekaterina Shein-<mask>, ballet dancer (Moscow State Academy of Choreography- The Bolshoi Ballet Academy), actress (Russian Academy of Theatre Arts), curator of exhibitions on the theme of ballet. Private collections exist in Russia, the USA, France, Monaco, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc.Solo exhibitions
<mask>'s works have been exhibited in over 300 solo exhibitions worldwide, from Paris, Geneva and Berlin to Dallas New-York and Beijing. Filmography

 The Story of Asya Klyachina (1966) (Russian История Аси Клячиной, которая любила, да не вышла замуж, Istoriya Asi Klyachinoy, kotoraya lyubila, da ne vyshla zamuzh)

 The First Teacher (1966) (Russian Первый учитель, Pervyy uchitel) – Art director, Costume Designer
 A Nest of Gentry (1969) (Russian Дворянское гнездо, Dvoryanskoe gnezdo), dabed on the novel Home of the Gentry – Set designer
 Solaris (1972) (Russian Солярис, Solyaris) Artistic director

References
Biography of Michael Romadina site biogs.redban.ru (Russian)

Michael Romadin site of Andrei Konchalovsky (Russian)

1940 births
2012 deaths
20th-century Russian painters
Russian male painters
21st-century Russian painters

masks:
Mikhail Nikolayev
Romadin
Mikhail
Mikhail Romadin
Nikolai Romadin
Mikhail Romadin
Mikhail Romadin
Mikhail Romadin
Romadin
Mikhail Romadin
Mikhail Roma
Romadin
Romadin
Mikhail Romadin
Nikolai Mikhailovich
Romadin
Romadina
Romadina
Romadin