STRANG, WILLIAM (1859-1921), Scottish painter and engraver, was born at Dumbarton, N.B., on Feb. 13, 1859, the son of Peter Strang, builder. In 1875 he went to London, where he studied under Legros at the Slade School for six years. He became assistant master in the etching class, and was one of the original members of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, exhibiting at their first exhibition in 1881. In his imaginative etchings he achieved almost painfully realistic effects without sacrificing any thing of his fine, clean drawing and severity of design. He worked in many manners—etching, dry-point, mezzotint, sand-ground mezzotint—and invented a burin of his own for burin engraving.
His portrait etchings introduced a new form of reproductive portraiture, each proof being in a sense an original. Thomas Hardy, Henry Newbolt and Rudyard Kipling are among the many distinguished men who sat to him for these plates. Strang's paint ings, portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families have been exhibited in the Royal Academy, the Inter national Society and several German exhibitions. In 1902 Strang retired from the Society of Painter-Etchers as a protest against the inclusion in its exhibitions of etched or engraved reproductions of pictures. He afterwards exhibited chiefly at the "Society of
Twelve," the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, and the Royal Academy. He was a member of the Inter national Society, and became, in 1906, an A.R.A. for engraving, on the revival of that degree, and in 1921 R.A. (Engraving). In 1918 he was made president of the International Society. He died at Bournemouth on April 12, 1921.
Strang's engraved work includes "Tinkers", "St. Jerome", "A Woman washing her feet", an "Old Book-stall with a man lighting his pipe from a flare," the "Head of a Peasant Woman" (on a sand ground mezzotint) , "Hunger", "the Bachelor's End" and "The Salva tion Army." Among his sets of etchings are the "Pilgrim's Progress," the "Ancient Mariner", his own "Allegory of Death" and the "Plow man's Wife"; in collaboration with J. B. Clark he illustrated Baron Munchausen, Sindbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba. Proofs from his portrait plates have great value. In the Tate Gallery, London, are two self-portraits and a landscape. A collection of 136 etchings is in the British Museum. The catalogue of his etched work, contain ing small representations of all his plates (747) was published in 5906 (supplements in 1912 and 1923) .