Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue

Illustrator, painter and designer; born 15 August 1845, in Liverpool. Brought up in Devon; apprenticed to engraver W.J. Linton at age 13; early success as a painter and illustrator, particularly of colour woodblock picture books for children, which quite eclipsed his ambitious allegorical painting; in the 1880s joined William Morris in the Socialist movement and became the artist of the cause, designing posters and cartoons; key figure in the Art Workers Guild, the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society (president 1888–93 and 1896–1912) and the Art Congress Association (1888–9); exh. Grosvenor Gallery and New Gallery, and in the United States (1891) and Hungary (1900); held short-lived teaching posts at Manchester School of Art and Royal College of Art, London (1898); died 14 March 1915, at Horsham, Sussex shortly after his wife’s suicide. [1]

Versatile and prolific, Crane ‘was illustrator, painter, designer, craftsman and sculptor by turn; he poured out designs for books, tapestries, stained glass, wall-papers, damasks and cotton fabrics' [2] He flourished in the Aesthetic Movement atmosphere and later described his desire ‘to reunite the various sections of art as against modern classification’. [3]

Personally, Crane was ‘a small dapper man with carefully curled moustaches' who wore a yellow silk tie and velvet coat and enjoyed entertaining and fancy dress, in a life of self-conscious bohemianism. ‘His mind, perhaps like his house, was too full to be kept dusted and tidy; but he had unusually broad sympathies and … his spirit kept open house’. [4]

Dr Jan Marsh

Referencesback to top

Chiarini 1979
Chiarini, M., Gli Uffizi: Catalogo generale, Florence, 1979.

Crane 1907
Crane, W., An Artist’s Reminiscences, London, 1907.

Crawford 2004b
Crawford, A., ‘Crane, Walter (1845–1915)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; online ed., October 2007.

Davids 2000
Davids, R., The Artist as Portrait, exh. cat., Fine Art Society, London, 2000.

Dorment 1985
Dorment, R., Alfred Gilbert, New Haven and London, 1985.

Engen 1975
Engen, R., Walter Crane as a Book Illustrator, London, 1975.

Gould 2004
Gould, V.F., G.F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, London, 2004.

Henderson 1967
Henderson, P., William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends, London, 1967; rev. ed. 1986.

Lago 1982
Lago, M., ed., Burne-Jones Talking, London, 1982.

Lawrence 1897
Lawrence, A.H., ‘Mr Walter Crane and his Art’, The Idler, 1897, p.756.

Maas 1984
Maas, J., The Victorian Art World in Photographs, London, 1984.

MacCarthy 1994
MacCarthy, F., William Morris: A Life for Our Time, London, 1994.

Massé 1935
Massé, H.J.L.J., The Art-Workers’ Guild 1884–1934, Oxford, 1935.

Monkhouse 1899
Monkhouse, W.C., British Contemporary Artists, London and New York, 1899.

New York & Houston 1988
Painters by Painters, exh. cat., National Academy of Design, New York and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1988.

O’Donoghue 1908–22
O’Donoghue, F., Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 5 vols, London, 1908–22 (and vol.6, H.M. Hake, Supplement and indexes, 1925).

Physick 1982
Physick, J., The Victoria and Albert Museum, Oxford, 1982.

Rothenstein 1926
Rothenstein, J., The Portrait Drawings of William Rothenstein 1889–1925, London, 1926.

Rothenstein 1898a
Rothenstein, W., English Portraits, London, 1898.

Rothenstein 1931–2
Rothenstein, W., Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 2 vols, London, 1931–2.

Smith & Hyde 1989
Smith, G., and S. Hyde, Walter Crane: Artist, Designer and Socialist, exh. cat., Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1989.

Spencer 1975
Spencer, I., Walter Crane, London, 1975.

Swanson 1990
Swanson, V.G., The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London, 1990.

Watts 1912
Watts, M.S., George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, 3 vols, London, 1912.