William McCance (1894–1970) was a Scottish artist, and was second Controller of the Gregynog Press in Powys, mid-Wales.
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]