Strang enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London in 1876, aged seventeen. There he studied under the school’s newly-appointed professor, Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), a painter, sculptor and printmaker, whose teaching had a profound and lasting influence on the young artist. Legros, who had been a leading member of the etching revival in France, introduced an etching class for which a young Strang served as Assistant Master from 1880 to1881. This print was made after Legros’s death and is based on a sketch drawn some years earlier in the garden at Legros’s house. Strang described his old master as ‘the greatest teacher that ever lived, because he was the greatest artist who ever taught’.