Oil On Canvas Portrait Of Joseph Chesborough Dyer By Joseph Allen (1769 - 1839)

A fine and masterful early 19th century English portrait of the industrialist and inventor Joseph Chessborough Dyer by Joseph Allen (1769 - 1839)

Joseph Allen (1769-1839).                                                                                  
Joseph Allen was a celebrated 19th century English portrait  painter who was born in Birmingham in 1769. In 1798/9 he settled in Wrexham. He also worked in Liverpool and Manchester and famously founded the Liverpool Academy in 1810.

Joseph Chessborough Dyer (1780-1871)

Chessborough Dyer was an inventor, son of Captain Nathaniel Dyer of the Rhode Island navy, was born at Stonnington Point, Connecticut, on 15 Nov. 1780, and educated at the common school of Opdike's Newtown, now called Wickford, Narragansett Bay. 

His mother died from hardships she underwent during the storming and burning of New London under Benedict Arnold. Joseph had a turn for mechanics, and when he was a young man he constructed an unsinkable lifeboat, in which he and his father took excursions along the coast. 

At the age of sixteen he entered the counting-house of a French refugee named Nancrède, to part of whose business he subsequently succeeded. 

He first came to England in 1802, and was frequently in the country from that date until his final settlement here in 1811, when he married Ellen Jones, daughter of Somerset Jones of Gower Street, London. 

Joseph devoted himself to mechanics, and was active in introducing into England several American inventions, which became exceedingly profitable to him and others. One of the first of these was Perkins plan for steel-engraving (1809); then followed fur-shearing and nail-making machines (1810), and the carding engine (1811). Fulton sent him drawings and specifications of his steamboat in 1811, and Dyer experienced many difficulties and discouragements in bringing the system into use in England. 

In 1825 he took out his first patent for a roving frame used in cotton-spinning, invented by Danforth and subsequently much improved and simplified by himself. 

He lived at Camden Town until 1816, when he settled in Manchester. 

He was associated with William Tudor in founding the ‘North American Review’ (1815), of which the first four numbers were written by Tudor and himself. He was also concerned in the foundation of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ in 1821. 

In 1830 he was a member of a delegation to Paris to take the contributions from the town of Manchester for the relief of the wounded in the revolution of July, and to congratulate Louis-Philippe on his accession. It was claimed that he, as chairman of the Reform League, was instrumental in procuring the prompt recognition of the French king by the British government. 

He aided in establishing the Royal Institution  and the Mechanical Institution at Manchester; and was one of the original directors of the ill-fated Bank of Manchester, which, after a few years of great prosperity, came by fraud and neglect to a disastrous end, whereby Dyer lost no less than 98,000L.

He engaged in the struggle for parliamentary reform and in the promotion of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and in later years was closely associated with the Anti-Corn law League, both in its formation and operations...

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