etching on paper, dated 1903 in the plate, signed in pencil
mounted, framed and under glass

Note: A twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill, already famous for his wartime correspondence for The Morning Post and escape from a prisoner-of-war camp, successfully stood as a Conservative candidate in Oldham. Chamberlain spoke on his behalf, and Churchill later recalled the experience: "I watched my honoured guest with close attention. He loved the roar of the multitude, and with my father could always say 'I have never feared the English democracy.' The blood mantled in his cheek, and his eye as it caught mine twinkled with pure enjoyment". Churchill later wrote of the period, "Mr. Chamberlain was incomparably the most live, sparkling, insurgent, compulsive figure in British affairs ... 'Joe' was the one who made the weather. He was the man the masses knew."
Note 2: William Strang was a Scottish painter and printmaker. Following a brief apprenticeship with a shipbuilding firm in Clydesdale, he entered the Slade School of Art (1876) where he adhered to the uncompromising realism advocated by his teacher Alphonse Legros. After completing his studies at the Slade (1880), Strang became Legros's assistant in the printmaking class for a year. For the next 20 years he worked primarily as an etcher. His etchings include landscapes in the tradition of Rembrandt, pastoral themes indebted to Giorgione and macabre genre subjects, marked by a sense of tension and suspended animation. He also etched 150 portraits of leading artistic and literary figures. The commitment to realism and psychological intensity that characterises the best of Strangs etched work is also evident in the paintings that dominated the latter half of his career. An important collection of Strang's graphic work is held by Glasgow Museums & Art Galleries.