William Strang, “Lady with a Red Hat”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 102.9 x 77.5 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland
William Strang, born in February of 1859, was a Scottish painter and printmaker, known for his illustrating the works of writer and preacher John Bunyan, poet Samuel Coleridge, and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling.
At an early age, Strang attended Dumbarton Academy, a mixed secondary school, after which he worked in a counting-house of a shipbuilding firm for fifteen months. He left for London, at the age of sixteen, in 1875 to study art at the Slade School, under painter and etcher Alphonse Legros. Strang achieved success as an etcher, and became assistant master in the etching class. An original member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880, he exhibited his work at their first show in 1881.
Strang worked in a multiple of techniques, including etching, drypoint, mezzotint, engraving, lithography, and wood cut. A privately produce catalogue of his engravings contained more than three hundred items. His work on poet William Nicholson’s “Ballad of Aken Drum” is known for its strong drawing and clear,
delicate shadow tones. Strang provided fourteen illustrations for the 1910 edition of John Bunyan’s series “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, and produced a series of etchings and woodcuts, from 1896 to 1903, illustrating Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
William Strang painted a number of portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families. These were exhibited at several German exhibitions, at The International Society, and at the Royal Academy. His decorative biblical series of Adam and Eve, commissioned for the private library of the Hodson family in the West Midlands, was exhibited at the Whitechapel Exhibition in 1910.
In later years Strang developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water color. His method gave his work the qualities of delicate modeling, and refined form and gradations. Strang drew portraits in this manner of many members of the Commonwealth’s Order of Merit for the royal library at Windsor Castle.
William Strang was elected a member of The International Society in 1905, elected as an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1906, and became a master of the Art Workers Guild in 1907. He died in April of 1921 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. In 1955, his son David, also an artist, gifted impressions of the bulk of William Strang’s etchings to the National Gallery of Scotland.
Note: William Strang’s “Lady with a Red Hat” is a portrait of author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. The strong colors of her outfit and her assertive pose with elbow extended conveys her flamboyant personality. An independent thinker, stylish and assertive, Vita Sackville-West shocked Edwardian society by her affairs with other women.
Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her epic “The Land” and in 1933 for her “Collected Poems”. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of the 1928 “Orlando: A Biography” by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.
Insert Note: When William Strang exhibited his self-portrait at the Royal Academy in 1919, he gave it the simple title “A Painter”. Drawing on Impressionism and Symbolism, he had been one of the innovators of the modern style in Britain; but the symmetry of this work and the figure’s direct gaze is very reminiscent of the self-portraits of Rembrandt. Here, in his old age, Strang refers to a traditional model of the artist as a workman secluded in his studio. The painting is in the collection of the Tate Museum, London.