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William Strang, RA RE RP PIS (1859-1921)
The son of a builder, William Strang was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, on 13 February 1859. He was educated at Dumbarton Academy and first worked in the counting-house of a shipbuilder. Moving to London in 1875, he studied under Alphonse Legros at the Slade School (1876-80), and worked as assistant in his etching class (1880-81). Legros would join Daumier and Forain, alongside older masters, as an important model. Establishing himself as a powerful and versatile printmaker at an early age, Strang helped found the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1881, and won a Silver Medal for Etching at the Paris International Exhibition in 1889. He would later become an Etching member of the Royal Academy (ARA 1906, RA 1921).
Subjects included literary figure groups and portraits of writers, and a strong overlap developed between his work as a printmaker and as an illustrator. Some of Strang’s earliest sets of illustrations –including The Pilgrim’s Progress – were produced as etchings in the 1880s, though only published a decade later. By then he was also working in pen and ink, collaborating with Joseph Benwell Clark, a former fellow student, on Lucian’s True History (1894), The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1895), Ali Baba and Sinbad (both 1896). The first of these also included work by Aubrey Beardsley, and he undoubtedly set the illustrative style that Strang and Clark followed. Strang was a friend Charles Ricketts and of C R Ashbee (a fellow member of the Art Workers’ Guild) and, like them, sympathetic to the aims of the private press movement: at the turn of the century, he fulfilled commissions for Ashbee’s Essex House Press and started, though abandoned, work on an Essex House Bible. Strang produced few illustrations after 1902, and turned increasingly to painting in oil and watercolour, as well as using coloured chalks to produce portrait drawings in the spirit of Hans Holbein. (This vein is exemplified by the present image of Percy Bate.) He had been awarded a Gold Medal for Painting at the Dresden International Exhibition in 1897, and exhibited widely. Later affiliations include membership of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (1904) and Presidency of the International Society (1918-21). He died suddenly at a hotel in Bournemouth on 12 April 1921. His two sons, Ian and David, both became fine etchers. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (Glasgow) and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh); the Brigham Young University Museum of Art (Provo), The David & Alfred Smart Museum at the University of Chicago and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the National Library of Australia (Canberra).
