Frederick Hurten Rhead

His father Frederick Alfred Rhead began his career as an apprentice at Mintons Ltd, where he learned to be a pâte-sur-pâte artist.

Emigrants from Stoke-on-Trent, where ceramics was the dominant industry, tended to settle in such places as Trenton, New Jersey, or, as in Frederick Rhead's case, Ohio.

[4] Production at Tiltonville was being transferred to nearby Wheeling, and in 1904, Rhead left to work as a designer for the Weller pottery in Zanesville, Ohio, but he did not stay there long.

[5] In 1908 the company reduced the amount of handcrafting in its production, and the following year Rhead moved to University City, Missouri, although his brother Harry stayed on at Roseville.

Taxile Doat continued pottery production at University City for a few years, but the Rheads moved to California.

Apart from teaching, Rhead produced some vases and tiles at University City, sometimes working with his wife Agnes.

[7] It was bought on behalf of the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, currently under construction in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 1913 he was replaced at the Arequipa Pottery by Albert Solon, another potter from Staffordshire, who reduced production costs.

[9] Rhead remained in California, starting his own pottery studio in Santa Barbara in late 1913 or early 1914.

In 2007 a Rhead vase from this period set the record, subsequently overtaken, as the most expensive American art pottery at auction.

In 1927 Rhead was hired as art director of the Homer Laughlin China Company in Newell, West Virginia.

Rhead designed a similar line called "Harlequin", which was sold in Woolworth's, an important customer of Homer Laughlin.

Rhead was active in two different fields: studio pottery and industrial ceramics, where there was sometimes less scope for artistic originality.

Without that key color, and with the severe reduction in variety of open-stock items available, the appeal of the line suffered.

Despite the introduction of a new palette of glaze colours,[13] sales progressively declined over the following 27 years until the entire line was discontinued in January 1973.

This second incarnation of Fiesta dinnerware was first marketed in early 1986 to capitalise on the 50th anniversary of the original line's introduction.

Bumpus hoped to take a version of the exhibition to the US, but, despite American interest in the Rhead family, he was not able to obtain the necessary funding.