English painter, illustrator, designer, writer and teacher. He
showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw
by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane
(1808-59). A series of illustrations to Tennyson's The Lady of
Shalott (Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) was shown
first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour, and then to the
engraver William James Linton, to whom Crane was apprenticed in
1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and
economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks. His early illustrative
works included vignette wood-engravings for John R. Capel Wise's
The New Forest: Its History and its Scenery (1862).