William Strang’s The Doings of Death: A Perfect Union of Realism to the Macabre
by Isabelle Holloway
William Strang, “Death the Comforter.“ National Galleries of Scotland.
A darkly-clad figure reposes into a shaded space, struck on the countenance by a furtive half-light. His features are furrowed in stoic virtue, and penetrated by a hearty Chevron mustache and by eyes held in suspenseful agitation. In such self-portraits, William Strang fulfills a classically Scottish vision, resembling the Byronic male who conceals some brooding horror on a sunless domain.
The early life of Strang reinforces this Scottish tradition: born in 1859 as the son of a builder in Dumbarton, a town on the River Clyde, Strang was born into a working-class society. He pursued ambitions ranging from shipbuilding apprenticeship to office clerkship, even making attempts at one point to flee to sea in order to become a sailor. Of course, these ambitions were relatively short-lived owing to Strang’s all-consuming desire for artistic expression, and he soon entered into formal artistic training. The following period of his career oversaw immense self-realization and guidance from the time spent under his mentor, Alphonse Legros. Strang was spurred into a life-long love affair with the studio arts; particularly, as reinforced by his later position as Assistant Master within Legros’s etching class, the printmaking technique.
William Strang, Self Portrait. C. 1919. National Galleries of Scotland.
Today, however, Strang’s legacy is overshadowed by the paintings of the latter half of his career; or rather, by the sitters of these paintings. Many of the time’s most widely acknowledged creatives took their seat in front of Strang’s easel, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Vita Sackville-West, and Thomas Hardy. Yet, amid a collection of over 750 original print pieces, and a robust membership in the Society of Twelve, a group of artists who dedicated themselves to preserving and reviving a dying interest in original etchings and engravings, Strang’s passion and duty to the art of printmaking is hardly disputable.
If there is any one such piece that I believe to have wholly rendered itself as Strang’s magnum opus within his fruitful career as an artist, I would prize the print The Doings of Death.
The Doings of Death is a set of 12 chiaroscuro woodcuts arranged in a quasi-narrative fashion. Each piece features Death as a personified accompaniment to another character. Chronologically, these pairings include: Death and the Children, Death the King, Death the Judge, Death and the Dancers, Death and the Husbandman, Death and the Robber, Death the Leech, Death on the Barricades, Death and the Artist, Death the Lover, Death the Comforter, and Death the Mourner. These 12 woodcuts significantly lace Death with a wide demographic of subjects beyond apparent recognition of binary oppositions and structures.
William Strang, “The Doings of Death.“ Abbott and Holder.
What is the significance of a set in which the personified Death, a skeletal form shrouded in darkness, haunts omnipresently over the shoulders of its diverse subjects? More pertinently, how does this piece epitomize the full range of Strang’s artistic portfolio? The answers to these questions necessitates a deeper venture into the realist style and macabre technique scaffolding Strang’s work.
In virtually all the works that he composed, Strang imbued a highly refined, realist touch. Strang’s modest origins instilled a lifelong notion of affection and devotion to his working-class community, and he consequently seeked to offer raw accounts of their common routine. The influence of Legros was additionally critical to such truthful portrayals of life; moved by his working associations with Realist artists, Legros urged a similar technique on his pupils. Legros’s reflections of honest existence within the artistic medium emboldened Strang to depict previously latent conditions of worldly and institutional perversity. Paintings as in The Green Cloak and etchings as in Potato Lifting attest to Strang’s cultivated homage to authenticity and converse denial to aesthetics. In each piece, intense linework frames the subjects and their landscapes while simultaneously maintaining a drained perception of color or vivacity. A mastery persists: faithfully crisp definition greets faithfully dismal nostalgia. A sensation of stonewashed gloom seeps into the emotional core of Strang’s vast collection, betraying surprise that the macabre or death are leading muses at play.
Realism and death are inevitably and inextricably linked: nothing is more authentic to life than the universal resolution which ultimately meets all its constituents. Strang recognized this precept from his artistic conception. The morbid portrayals of life which inevitably intertwine with the realist’s brush or tool are largely attributable to his gritty experiences within the working-class and the macabre, supernatural fascinations of his mentor who, at one time, etched a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s eerie stories. Strang developed a particular interest with the lives of the urban poor, often providing glimpses of death and decay within various intimate, day-to-day moments as in the collection The Earth Fiend. Beyond his sources of civilian life, Strang gained further inspiration from battle scenes, having paid a visit to the front lines of World War I in order to compile sketches of the trenches in 1914. Deathly personifications and symbolisms, like the Grim Reaper and the scythe, are also heavily recurrent throughout Strang’s work, as well as biblical portendors of fate like the angel or Apollyon as in the collection Paradise Lost. Certainly, Death’s most transcendent beings have slurked their way through the darkened crevices of Strang’s work, marking the artwork of Strang indelibly with an air of The Doings of Death.
Though hardly memorialized in the modern treasury of celebrated art, The Doings of Death issues a comprehensive, revelatory view of both William Strang’s work and the paragon which exists within the marriage between realism and the macabre on print. In the literal sense, the ominous façade of Death which looms across the frames seems to appear unnoticed and is even embraced by its accompanying characters. Characterized by a dark hood and a pale, skeletal physiognomy, Death attains a menacing status as a result of the chiaroscuro style of Strang’s collection. This “light-dark” play acts as a substitute for the animating qualities of color technique by emphasizing the “light-dark” contrast, and therefore presence, of Death’s face while still retaining an underlying sensation of grim achromaticism in the surrounding matter of the set’s frames. The society of Death fails to proffer pattern, bias, or discrimination; rather, the company of Death haunts any figure or setting and more prominently mingles in a series of contradictions. Among these contradictions include Death the King and Death and the Husbandman. As king, Death raises his royal scepter and tilts his head upward in a gesture of self-importance before a prostrating crowd of common folk. Adorned with a bejeweled crown and a decadent robe, Death poses itself as a model for contrast against a group which sports a more worn set of attire. In Death and the Husbandman, Death is observed in a lowly, pastoral landscape atop which lay agrarian tools. Barefoot and veiled with a modest black hood, Death appears to assist a husbandman of tattered dress with putting on a jacket. The reversal of status roles within these two pieces highlights the omnipresence of Death among every demographic in society.
William Strang, Left: Death the King; Right: Death and the Husbandman. National Galleries of Scotland.
Outside human materiality and occupation, Death is also pictured to exist beyond intangible thresholds like time and emotion as in Death and the Children and Death the Mourner. Symbolically, and in chronological symmetry, Death exists in a physical juxtaposition. In Death and the Children, Death, hardly skeletal, bears a laurel wreath and evinces a divine quality by the light of its countenance and in the embrace of a group of frollicking children. A more static, covert Death takes its place in Death the Mourner: Death clasps its hands together in a wretched pose and appears altogether consumed by grief as it cowers toward the ground in fully shrouded form. Viewers gain an appreciation of Death as a force which exists in just about every facet of life beyond sensory perceptions, constructs, and even justice, as Death’s agenda is declared as a fickle, unpremeditated feat which conducts its “doings” wheresoever, and relevantly whenever, it pleases, whether in the dawn of new life or in the dusk of bygone souls.
William Strang, Left: Death and the Children; Right: Death the Mourner. National Galleries of Scotland.
Although contemporary recognition of Strang’s work extends largely to the portraiture of his eminent subjects, The Doings of Deaths faithfully illustrates that which most fascinated, disturbed, and defined the very heart of Strang and his work: Realism and the macabre. The unfading, mutual bond between death and Realist renderings of the natural world are illuminated to an unprecedentedly heightened degree in Strang’s 12-set piece. The Doings of Death is a collection which serves as an artistic cautionary tale and an unblemished looking glass for the whole of its viewers, leaving a single, resounding message: that death is uncontainable, unavoidable, and intrinsically essential to life.
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