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30. William Strang (1859-1921) Death and the Ploughman’s Wife: Frontispiece
Etching, 1888, 125 x 200 mm., Binyon 116. Very fine impression on laid paper with full margins, signed in pencil and from the edition of 110. Strang, who came from the Lowlands of Scotland, wrote a ballad of the above title and then illustrated it with a dozen original prints, publishing it as a sort of book/portfolio in a limited edition. The image is a classic dance of death -- Strang, like many fine artists, had no qualms about borrowing from the past – but with certain differences. There is, first, the translation to rural Britain, hardly unexpected. But second, there is the strange passivity of the scene, the participants neither startled, nor frightened, nor exalted, but oddly reserved, unemotional. This is not a technical defect in the drawing or etching; so far as technique is concerned, Strang could do whatever he wanted to do. It is, rather, a tiny window onto a proverbially dour personality, a part of whose creative instinct was to find a certain weirdness in mundane actions and things, and a certain normality in those things nominally weird. |
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