Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/1008

 STRAMONIUM, in medicine, a drug obtained from the leaves and seeds of the Datura stramonium. Both contain an alkaloid known as daturine. From the seeds is made extractum stramonii. The tinctura stramonii is made from the leaves. The physiological action of stramonium resembles that of belladonna, except that stramonium relaxes to a greater extent the unstriped muscle of the bronchial tubes; for this reason it is used in asthma to relieve the bronchial spasm. Cigarettes made of stramonium leaves may be smoked or the tincture may be taken internally. Frequently the leaves powdered together with equal quantities of the powdered leaves of the Cannabis Indica and lobelia mixed with potassium nitrate are burned in an open dish. The preparation gives off dense fumes which afford great relief to the asthmatic paroxysm. Numerous patent " cures " for asthma contain these ingredients in vaiying proportions. Daturine is used as daturinae sulphas. In acute mania it acts like hyoscyamine in producing sleep. In large doses stramonium is a narcotic poison producing the well-marked stages of exaltation of function, diminution of functional activity, and later loss of function, sinking into coma and paralysis.

 STRANG, WILLIAM (1850–), English painter and engraver, was born at Dumbarton, N.B., on the 13th of February 1859, the son of Peter Strang, builder. He was educated at the Dumbarton Academy, and worked for fifteen months in the counting-house of a firm of shipbuilders. He went to London in 1875 when he was sixteen, and studied his art under Alphonse Legros at the Slade School for six years. Strang became assistant master in the etching class, and himself followed this art with great success. He was one of the original members of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, and exhibited at their first exhibition in 1881. Some of his early plates were published in the Portfolio and other art magazines. He worked in many manners, etching, dry point, mezzotint, sand-ground mezzotint, and burin engraving, and invented a draw-burin of his own. Lithography and wood-cutting were also used by him to reproduce his abundant imaginings. He cut a large wood- engraving of a man ploughing, that has been published by the Art for Schools Association. A privately produced catalogue of his engraved work contains more than three hundred items. Amongst his earlier works " Tinkers," " St Jerome," " A Woman washing her Feet," an " Old Book-stall with a man lighting his pipe from a flare," and " The head of a Peasant Woman," on a sand-ground mezzotint, may be remembered. Later plates such as " Hunger," " The Bachelor's End " and " The Salvation Army " cannot be forgotten. Some of his best etchings have been in series; one of the earliest, illustrating William Nicholson's ballad of " Aken Drum," is remarkable for delicate and clear workmanship in the shadow tones, showing great skill and power over his materials, and for strong drawing. Another good series was the " Pilgrim's Progress," revealing austere sympathy with Bunyan's teaching. Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " and Strang's own " Allegory of Death " and the " Plowman's Wife," have served him with suitable imaginative subjects. Some of Rudyard Kipling's stories have been illustrated by him, too, and Strang's portrait of Kipling has been one of his most successful portrait plates. Other good etched portraits are of Mr Ernest Sichel, fine as a Vandyck and of Mr J. B. Clark, with whom Strang collaborated in illustrating Baron Munchausen and Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba, published in 1895 and 1896. Thomas Hardy, Henry Newbolt and many other distinguished men also sat to him. Proofs from these plates have been much valued; in fact, Strang's portrait etchings have inaugurated a new form of reproductive portraiture. A portrait which is a work of art and can be reproduced a number of times without losing any of its art qualities is one ideal way of recording appearances, as such prints can be treasured by many owners. Strang produced a number of good paintings, portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families, which have been exhibited in the Royal Academy, the International Society, and several German exhibitions. He painted a decorative series of scenes from the story of Adam and Eve for the library of Mr Hodson of Wolverhampton; they were exhibited at the Whitechapel exhibition in 1910. Some of his drawings from the nude model in silver point and red and black chalk are very beautiful as well as powerful and true. He also painted a number of landscapes, mostly of a small size. In later years he developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water colour. This method gives qualities of delicate modelling and refined form and gradations akin to the drawings of Holbein. He drew portraits in this manner of many members of the Order of Merit for the royal library at Windsor Castle. In 1902 Strang retired from the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, as a protest against the inclusion in its exhibitions of etched or engraved reproductions of pictures. His work was subsequently seen principally in the exhibitions of the Society of Twelve, of the International Society, to which body he was elected in 1905, and of the Royal Academy. Strang was elected an associate engraver of the Royal Academy when that degree was wisely revived in 1906.

STRANGE, SIR ROBERT (1721-1792), Scottish line engraver, descended from the Scottish family of Strange, or Strang, of Balcasky, Fife, was born in the mainland of Orkney, on the 14th of July 1 721. In his youth he spent some time in an attorney's office; but, having manifested a taste for drawing, he was apprenticed, in 1735, to Richard Cooper, an engraver in Edinburgh. After leaving Cooper in 1741 he started on his own account as an engraver, and had attained a fair position when, in 1745, he joined the Jacobite army as a member of the corps of life-guards. He engraved a half-length of the Young Pre- tender, and also etched plates for a bank-note designed for the payment of the troops. He was present at the battle of Cul- loden, and after the defeat remained in hiding in the Highlands, but ultimately returned to Edinburgh, where, in 1747, he married Isabella, only daughter of William Lumisden, son of a bishop of Edinburgh. In the following year he proceeded to Rouen, and there studied drawing under J. B. Descamps, carrying off the first prize in the Academy of Design. In 1749 he removed to Paris, and placed himself under the celebrated Le Bas. It was from this master that he learned the use of the dry point, an instrument which he greatly improved and employed with excellent effect in his own engravings. In 1750 Strange returned to England. Presently he settled in London along with his wife and daughter, and superintended the illustrations of Dr William Hunter's great work on the Gravid Uterus, published in 1774. The plates were engraved from red chalk drawings by Van Rymsdyk, now preserved in the Hunterian Museum, Glas- gow, and two of them were executed with great skill by Strange's own hand. By his plates of the " Magdalen " and " Cleopatra," engraved after Guido in 1753, he at once established his pro- fessional reputation. He was invited in 1759 to engrave the portraits of the prince of Wales and Lord Bute, by Allen Ramsay, but declined, on the ground of the insufficient remuneration offered and of the pressure of more congenial work after the productions of the Italian masters. His refusal was attributed to his Jacobite proclivities, and it led to an acrimonious corre- spondence with Ramsay, and to the loss, for the time, of royal patronage. In 1760 Strange started on a long-meditated tour in Italy. He studied in Florence, Naples, Parma, Bologna, and Rome, executing innumerable drawings, of which many â€” the " Day " of Correggio, the " Danae " and the " Venus and Adonis " of Titian, the " St Cecilia " of Raphael, and the Bar- berini " Magdalen " of Guido, &câ€” were afterwards reproduced by his burin. On the Continent he was received with great distinction, and he was elected a member of the academies of Rome, Florence, Parma and Paris. He left Italy in 1764, and, having engraved in the French capital the " Justice " and the " Meekness " of Raphael, from the Vatican, he carried them with him to London in the following year. The rest of his life was spent mainly in these two cities, in the diligent prosecution of his art. In 1766 he was elected a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, and in 1775, piqued by