Richard Arkwright Junior

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Richard with his daughter, by Joseph Wright

The son of Sir Richard Arkwright of Cromford, Derbyshire, Richard Arkwright Junior (1755 - 1843) was the financier (creditor) of Samuel Oldknow of Marple and Mellor and a personal friend.

Sir Richard had earlier patented the water frame, a roller-spinning machine powered by water, that turned textile spinning into a factory industry and in so doing he founded the factory system of manufacture.

Richard Arkwright Junior followed in his illustrious father’s footsteps and he developed the factory system even further. He was an outstanding organiser of labour and machinery processing, ambitious, forceful and persevering.

He is represented together with his wife Mary and daughter Anne in a portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby. Painted in 1790 and intended as a pendant to Wright's portrait of Sir Richard, and was thought the best of the four paintings which hung in the Arkwrights family estate dining room a Willersley Castle. This painting was on loan and in the collection of Derby Museum and Art Gallery. The painting was sold at Sotheby’s on 29 November 2001.^[1]