Crane, WALTER

Crane, WALTER, painter and socialist, was born at Liverpool, 15th August 1845, the son of an artist, Thomas Crane (1808–59). He himself was trained as an artist, and his earlier as well as much of his later work consists of book-illustrations. Among these may be named his series of 'Toy-books' (1869–75), 'The Baby's Opera' (1877), and 'The Sirens Three,' in which last the poem as well as the designs was his work. In 1862 he began to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy, showing in that year 'The Lady of Shalott;' and he was a constant contributor to the Grosvenor Gallery from its foundation in 1877 till 1888. His pictures nearly always deal, in a somewhat decorative and archaic fashion, with subjects of an imaginative nature, such as 'The Riddle of the Sphinx' (1887). He has also produced many very delicate landscape subjects in water-colours; has designed wall-papers; and has published poems, illustrated by himself, Queen's Summer (1891), and The Claims of Decorative Art (1892). Since 1888 a member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-colours, he was in 1893 appointed art director to the city of Manchester.