Sir W. B. Richmond

Sir William Blake Richmond (1842–1921) was an English painter, the son of the portraitist George Richmond and named after his father's friend William Blake. He painted portraits of Browning, Darwin, Gladstone and Bismarck, was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and spent most of the 1890s designing the mosaics that cover the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral. Alarmed by London's air, he founded the Coal Smoke Abatement Society in 1898, an early environmental campaign. Democracy—False or True?, published in 1920 when he was seventy-eight, is his one book of political reflection, written in the aftermath of the war and dedicated to the working classes of England.