The Cause of the Poor

William Strang was a leading printmaker during the earlier years of the etching revival, a star student of Alphonse Legros at the Slade School of Art. He is less sentimental than the Victorians but less elegant than the aristocratic Edwardians. This still early print not only reveals Strang’s technical expertise in etching and drypoint, but it shows his social and political concerns. Critic Frank Newbolt observed the figures are ‘without any physical charm, in all sorts of attitudes. They are clever compositions, finely executed etchings… but they are not beautiful. They are not intended to be.’ Newbolt called it ‘a sermon in copper’, and linked it to The Socialists (1891), showing a crowd, including Strang himself, listening to a passionate orator. Strang was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and a friend of the designer, jeweller and socialist C.R. Ashbee.

In this etching, Strang depicts an interior, probably of a Victorian workhouse, and a cross-section of its inhabitants who appear strangers to each other. Two of them are on crutches, one a foreground boy, the other an elderly, bearded man. Another man, down on his luck, wears a top hat. This work owes much to Victorian artists like Frank Holl, Luke Fildes and Hubert Herkomer, whose paintings and related engravings of the 1870s and 1880s appealed to the social conscience. Strang’s style post-dates their greater sentimentality without going as far as Käthe Kollwitz's Aufruhr (Uprising) in expressionistic modernism. Interestingly, Strang makes every individual a psychological case study, whereas the more overtly socialist Kollwitz effaces individual identity in favour of a common cause.

Although Te Papa has many prints by Strang, this is one of the earliest, and differs both from the two later understated religious works as well as Strang’s line in Neo-Renaissance portraiture of the famous (e.g. Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, etc). Only a ‘slice of life’ street scene, The Procession (1901), has any close affiliation with it. In its early date and pro-socialist sentiments it makes a powerful  statement on the still topical themes of poverty and inequality. It relates excellently to the slightly later Kollwitz (see above). Another cognate works is Jean-François Millet’s depiction of the rural poor, The Diggers which Strang surely admired (the Victoria & Albert Museum impression was given to him by a friend). Spiritually and to some extent technically, the most impressive ancestors of this print in Te Papa's collection are Rembrandt’s Beggars Receiving Alms at the Door of A House and also his Beggar in a High Cap, Leaning on a Stick.

Sources:

Laurence Binyon, William Strang; Catalogue of his Etched Work (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), pp. vii–xvii.

Maurice Harold Grant, A Dictionary of British Etchers, (London: Rockliff, 1953), pp. 196-197

National Galleries Scotland: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/william-strang

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strang

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   January 2018