Edwardian Dining: William Strang

Although I am very interested in later Victorian, Edwardian and post WW1 art, I was not familiar with Scottish artist William Strang (1859–1921) until 2004. That was the year The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, an amazing exhibition, visited the National Gallery of Australia.

There were several very popular themes in the exhibition, but the social customs assoc­iated with Afternoon Tea were fasc­in­at­ing. This is a theme I have looked at before, in A History of Tea Rooms and the Suffragettes and Emanuel Phillips Fox - an Australian Impressionist. The exhibition essay suggested that the joy of easy outdoors eating was such that many artists were drawn to this subject, from the French Impressionists to E Phillips Fox in Alfresco 1904 and Déjeuner c1910.


Strang, Bank Holiday, 1912, Tate, 153 x 123 cm

I think indoor eating was less free, more telling.  As can be seen in Blog of an Art Admirer and a History Lover. 

Just before WW1, Strang painted group portraits of young moderns wearing fash­ionable outfits, playing out their courting rituals. In Bank Hol­id­ay 1912 (Tate), Strang suggested the young couple were just starting their courting, still uncertain of what to expect. The flowers, unwrapped, lie awkwardly on the chair. Ap­p­arently Strang created a deliberately understated image, leaving it all ambiguous enough so that the individual viewer could weave his own story. My own guess was that the young lady was a little too keen on making eye contact with her partner; the young man was a little too focused on ordering the scones.

It is appropriate that Donald Read’s book, Edwardian England, selected this very painting for the front cover.