(1721 - 1792)
Engraver Sir Robert Strange was apprenticed to Richard Cooper (1736-42). He married the sister of the private secretary to the Old Pretender and became involved in the Jacobite uprising but later made peace with the Hanoverian regime. In 1760 he travelled to Rome to draw Italian paintings and buy prints, and was made a member of the academies of Paris, Florence, Rome and Naples, and professor of the academy in Parma. He returned to London in 1765 and became a fellow of the Society of Artists. Frustrated that the new Royal Academy omitted engravers, with fellow artists he wrote a critical work on ‘The Conduct of the Royal Academicians’ (1771) and his own ‘Inquiry into the Establishment of the Royal Academy’ (1775). He was knighted in 1787.
