Born in 1847, William Wise was best known as a designer of tile decorations, collaborating in this field with the celebrated Staffordshire pottery firm Mintons. Described as a ‘man of considerable wide-ranging talents’, Wise on occasion turned his hand to etching and painting. He was a skilled figurative painter, as evidenced by his portrait of a young girl against a floral backdrop in the Potteries Museum, exhibited under the title Childhood at the Royal Academy in 1872. In the early 1870s, fresh out of the South Kensington Schools of Design, which he attended from 1867 to 1871, Wise was chosen to assist with the decorative panels at the South Kensington Museum, painting a design for a mosaic of Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), whose mastery of diverse media may well have chimed with the young artist. Wise died suddenly in 1889, aged only forty-two at Stoke-on-Trent, where he had moved following the death of his first wife. He left behind a second wife and eight children.
