Robert Strange

Sir Robert Strange (14 July 1721 – 5 July 1792) was a Scottish engraver. A Jacobite, he spent periods out of Great Britain, but was eventually reconciled to the Hanoverian succession and was knighted by George III.

Early life The eldest son of David Strang of Kirkwall in Orkney, by his second wife Jean, daughter of Malcolm Scollay of Hunton, he was born at Kirkwall on 14 July 1721. He entered the office of a brother, a lawyer in Edinburgh. He then was apprenticed to Richard Cooper, the elder, an engraver, for six years.

Strange fought in the rising of 1745. While with the army at Inverness, he engraved a plate for the bank-notes of the planned Stuart government. The plate was lost but subsequently found in a peat bog and purchased for The West Highland Museum by D.Y. Cameron, a skilled etcher, who printed some notes from it. thumb Jacobite bank notes printed from Strange's plate by DY CameronHe was at the battles of Prestonpans and Falkirk Muir in the Young Pretender's lifeguards; and was in hiding for some months after the Battle of Culloden.

Strange went to Italy in 1760. His connections afforded him a passport for travel in France—this was the height of the Seven Years' War—and introductions through Johann Georg Wille to Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Anton Raphael Mengs, and through Horace Walpole to Horace Mann. He studied at the Academy of St. Luke in Rome. He encountered Richard Dalton on a mission to copy Italian artworks that overlapped with his own plans, and a future rival in Francesco Bartolozzi. He returned to England in 1765, with an international reputation as engraver already established. Strange's second son was Thomas Andrew Lumisden Strange. A third son, Robert Montagu, was major-general in the Madras army.

Gallery