Japanese colour-prints, the methods of which he imitated in a series of toy-books, which started a new fashion. In 1862 a picture of his, “The Lady of Shalott,” was exhibited at the Royal Academy, but the Academy steadily refused his maturer work; and after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 he ceased to send pictures to Burlington House. In 1864 he began to illustrate for Mr Edmund Evans, the colour printer, a series of sixpenny toy-books of nursery rhymes, displaying admirable fancy and beauty of design, though he was limited to the use of three colours. He was allowed more freedom in a delightful series begun in 1873, The Frog Prince, &c., which showed markedly the influence of Japanese art, and of a long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871. The Baby’s Opera was a book of English nursery songs planned in 1877 with Mr Evans, and a third series of children’s books with the collective title, A Romance of the Three R’s, provided a regular course of instruction in art for the nursery. In his early “Lady of Shalott” the artist had shown his preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher’s and the decorator’s art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books. He followed the same course in The First of May: A Fairy Masque by his friend John R. Wise, text and decoration being in this case reproduced by photogravure. The “Goose Girl” illustration taken from his beautiful Household Stories from Grimm (1882) was reproduced in tapestry by William Morris, and is now in the South Kensington Museum. Flora’s Feast, A Masque of Flowers had lithographic reproductions of Mr Crane’s line drawings washed in with water colour; he also decorated in colour The Wonder Book of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Deland’s Old Garden; in 1894 he collaborated with William Morris in the page decoration of The Story of the Glittering Plain, published at the Kelmscott press, which was executed in the style of 16th-century Italian and German woodcuts; but in purely decorative interest the finest of his works in book illustration is Spenser’s Faerie Queene (12 pts., 1894–1896) and the Shepheard’s Calendar. The poems which form the text of Queen Summer (1891), Renascence (1891), and The Sirens Three (1886) are by the artist himself.
In the early ’eighties under Morris’s influence he was closely associated with the Socialist movement. He did as much as Morris himself to bring art into the daily life of all classes. With this object in view he devoted much attention to designs for textile stuffs, for wall-papers, and to house decoration; but he also used his art for the direct advancement of the Socialist cause. For a long time he provided the weekly cartoons for the Socialist organs, Justice and The Commonweal. Many of these were collected as Cartoons for the Cause. He devoted much time and energy to the work of the Art Workers’ Guild, and to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded by him in 1888. His own easel pictures, chiefly allegorical in subject, among them “The Bridge of Life” (1884) and “The Mower” (1891), were exhibited regularly at the Grosvenor Gallery and later at the New Gallery. “Neptune’s Horses,” which, with many other of Mr Crane’s pictures, came into the possession of Herr Ernst Seeger of Berlin, was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1893, and with it may be classed his “The Rainbow and the Wave.”
His varied work includes examples of plaster relief, tiles, stained glass, pottery, wall-paper and textile designs, in all of which he applied the principle that in purely decorative design “the artist works freest and best without direct reference to nature, and should have learned the forms he makes use of by heart.” An exhibition of his work of different kinds was held at the Fine Art Society’s galleries in Bond Street in 1891, and taken over to the United States in the same year by the artist himself. It was afterwards exhibited in the chief German, Austrian and Scandinavian towns, arousing great interest throughout the continent.
Mr Crane became an associate of the Water Colour Society in 1888; he was an examiner of the science and art department at South Kensington; director of design at the Manchester Municipal school (1894); art director of Reading College (1896); and in 1898 for a short time principal of the Royal College of Art. His lectures at Manchester were published with illustrated drawings as The Bases of Design (1898) and Line and Form (1900). The Decorative Illustration of Books, Old and New (2nd ed., London and New York, 1900) is a further contribution to theory.
A well-known portrait of Mr Crane by G. F. Watts, R.A., was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1893. There is a comprehensive and sumptuously illustrated book on The Art of Walter Crane, by P. G. Konody; a monograph (1902) by Otto von Schleinitz in the Künstler Monographien series (Bielefeld and Leipzig); and an account of himself by the artist in the Easter number of 1898 of the Art Journal.
CRANE, WILLIAM HENRY (1845– ), American actor,
was born on the 30th of April 1845, in Leicester, Massachusetts, and made his first appearance at Utica, New York, in Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment in 1863. Later he had a great success as Le Blanc the Notary, in the burlesque Evangeline (1873). He made his first hit in the legitimate drama with Stuart Robson
(1836–1903), in The Comedy of Errors and other Shakespearian plays, and in The Henrietta (1881) by Bronson Howard (1842–1908). This partnership lasted for twelve years, and subsequently Crane appeared in various eccentric character parts in such plays as The Senator and David Harum. In 1904 he turned to more serious work and played Isidore Izard in Business is Business, an adaptation from Octave Mirbeau’s Les Affaires sont les affaires.
CRANE (in Dutch, Kraan; O. Ger. Kraen; cognate, as also the Lat. grus, and consequently the Fr. grue and Span. grulla, with the Gr. γέρανος), the Grus communis or G. cinerea of ornithologists, one of the largest wading-birds, and formerly a native of England, where William Turner, in 1544, said that he had very often seen its young (“earum pipiones saepissime vidi”).
Notwithstanding the protection afforded it by sundry acts of
parliament, it has long since ceased from breeding in England.
Sir T. Browne (ob. 1682) speaks of it as being found in the open
parts of Norfolk in winter. In Ray’s time it was only known as
occurring at the same season in large flocks in the fens of Lincolnshire
and Cambridgeshire; and though mention is made of cranes’
eggs and young in the fen-laws passed at a court held at Revesby
in 1780, this was most likely but the formal repetition of an
older edict; for in 1768 Pennant wrote that after the strictest
inquiry he found the inhabitants of those counties to be wholly
unacquainted with the bird. The crane, however, no doubt
then appeared in Britain, as it does now, at uncertain intervals
and in unwonted places, having strayed from the migrating
bands whose movements have been remarked from almost the
earliest ages. Indeed, the crane’s aerial journeys are of a very
extended kind; and on its way from beyond the borders of the
Tropic of Cancer to within the Arctic Circle, or on the return
voyage, its flocks may be descried passing overhead at a
marvellous height, or halting for rest and refreshment on the
wide meadows that border some great river, while the seeming
order with which its ranks are marshalled during flight has long
attracted attention. The crane takes up its winter quarters
under the burning sun of Central Africa and India, but early in
spring returns northward. Not a few examples reach the chill
polar soils of Lapland and Siberia, but some tarry in the south
of Europe and breed in Spain, and, it is supposed, in Turkey.
The greater number, however, occupy the intermediate zone and
pass the summer in Russia, north Germany, and Scandinavia.
Soon after their arrival in these countries the flocks break up into
pairs, whose nuptial ceremonies are accompanied by loud and
frequent trumpetings, and the respective breeding-places of each
are chosen.
The nest is formed with little art on the ground in large open marshes, where the herbage is not very high—a tolerably dry spot being selected and used apparently year after year. Here the eggs, which are of a rich brown colour with dark spots, and always two in number, are laid. The young are able to run soon after they are hatched, and are at first clothed with tawny down. In the course of the summer they assume nearly the same grey plumage that their parents wear, except that the elongated plumes, which in the adults form a graceful covering of the hinder
