William McCance

Born on 6 August 1894 in Cambuslang, Scotland, William McCance was the seventh of eight children. After attending Hamilton Academy, McCance entered Glasgow School of Art, studying there 1911–15 and subsequently undertaking a teacher-training course at Glasgow's Kennedy Street school.

A conscientious objector in World War I, McCance was imprisoned.

After discharge from prison in 1919, McCance and his illustrator/engraver wife, Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980, married 1918), moved to London, where McCance was employed as a teacher and art critic, writing for The Spectator, the News Chronicle and Picture Post.^[1] McCance's paintings in the 1920s were unusual in that he was one of the few Scottish artists who embraced the cubist, abstract and machine-inspired arts movements that spread across Europe following the First World War.^[2][3] He was a friend of Hugh MacDiarmid and one of the artists associated with the Scottish Renaissance movement.^[4]

In the 1930s McCance took the post of second Controller of the famous Gregynog Press, Wales,^[5] founded in 1922. In 1943 he succeeded Robert Gibbings as lecturer in typography and book design at the University of Reading.^[4] On his retirement, a comprehensive exhibition of his work was mounted at the Reading Museum and Art Gallery.^[1] William McCance died in Ayrshire on 19 November 1970, aged 76.

A collection of his paintings is held in the National Galleries of Scotland and Dundee Art Gallery, and in 1975 a retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh.^[6][7]

• MacDiarmid, Hugh, "The Art of William McCance"', in Thomson, David Cleghorn (ed.), Saltire Review, Vol. 6, No. 22, Autumn 1960, The Saltire Society, Edinburgh, pp. 24 – 27
• Elliott, Patrick, "William McCance 1894 - 1970", in Strang, Alice (ed.) (2017), A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900 - 1950, National Galleries of Scotland, pp. 86 – 89, ISBN 978-1911054-16-0