
Luke Batterham
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Hardy's father was to die on 20 July. Lane had been trying to make arrangements for Hardy to sit for his portrait by William Strang, to be etched as frontispiece to Lionel Johnson's The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894). In the event, Strang managed to get his sitting at Max Gate a few weeks later. In another letter, Hardy was to tell Lane that whatever' its fidelity or otherwise as a portrait', it seemed to him 'an excellent specimen of Mr Strang's work' (16 September 1892). Our letter is published in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, i, 1978, p. 276; and is from the collection of Frederick B. Adams Jr., Sotheby's, 7 November 2001, lot 471.