STRANGE, Sir ROBERT (1721-92). A Scot tish engraver. He was born in Kirkwall, on one of the Orkney Islands. He made an attempt at law, but drawing claimed his chief attention, and he became an apprentice to Richard Cooper, at Edinburgh, for six years. To gain the hand of Isabella Luminsden, he joined the rebel army at the time of the Jacobite uprising, and after its defeat he was rescued by his lady-love, who hid him under her hooped skirt from the officers in search of him, and continued singing over her needlework. After their marriage, in 1747. he went to Paris and studied dry point under Le Bas. He made an improvement upon this process that gave a more beautiful finish to the engravings. He moved to London in 1751, de voting himself to historical engravings. but a refusal to engrave the portraits of the Prince of Wales and Lord Bute in 1759, supposedly for po litical reasons, was the cause of his departure for Italy. There his welcome was most cordial and he was made a member of the Academies of Rome, Florence, and Bologna, and professor of the Royal Academy at Parma. During a sub
sequent stay in Paris he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Painting. After his return to London in 1780 he made his peace with the reigning family by his engraving of West's "Apotheosis of the Princes Octavius and Alfred," and was awarded the honor of knight hood in 1787. Strange's engravings are chiefly after the great Italian masters, including Guido Reni, Salvato• Rosa, Raphael, and Correggin, and after Van Dyck. Though often defective in draughtsmanship, his work is characterized by grace of line and the excellency of his rendition of the flesh. Consult: Dennistoun, Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange (London, 1855) ; introduc tion to Marshal Keith's Memoir (ib., 1843) ; and the Life by Woodward prefixed to Twenty Mas terpieces of Strange (ib., 1847).