CRAWFORD, WILLIAM (1825–1869), painter, the second son of Archibald Crawford, the author of ‘Bonnie Mary Hay,’ and other popular lyrics, was born at Ayr in 1825. Evincing in boyhood a taste for artistic pursuits, he was at an early age sent to Edinburgh to study under Sir William Allan at the Trustees' Academy, where his success in copying one of Etty's great pictures secured for him a travelling bursary, by means of which he was enabled to visit Rome and study there for two or three years. While in Rome he contributed occasional papers and criticisms to some Edinburgh newspapers. On his return he settled down to the practice of his profession in Edinburgh, where he found an influential patron in Lord Meadowbank, and for several years he was engaged as a teacher of drawing at the Royal Institution until the School of Design became associated with the Science and Art Department. He was an indefatigable worker, and was almost invariably represented in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy by the largest number of works that any single artist was allowed to send. Among his contributions were various sacred subjects, and a considerable number of genre pictures, which were most successful when dealing with female characters. Many of them were bought by the Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. But Crawford achieved his greatest success with his portraits in crayons, especially those of children and young ladies, which were executed with a grace and felicity of style that rendered them perfect in their way, and caused them to be much sought after. He exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy in London also between 1852 and 1868. He was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1860, and died suddenly in Edinburgh 1 Aug. 1869. His wife also has been a contributor to the exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy.
Among Crawford's best works are his ‘May Queen’ and ‘May Morning,’ ‘The Return from Maying,’ 1861, ‘Waiting at the Ferry,’ 1865, ‘A Highland Keeper's Daughter’ and ‘More Free than Welcome,’ 1867, ‘The Wishing Pool,’ and ‘Too Late’—a beautiful young girl arriving at a garden gate ‘too late’ to prevent a duel between two rival lovers, one of whom lies dead near the gateway—exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1869.
[Scotsman, 3 Aug. 1869, reprinted in the Register and Magazine of Biography, 1869, ii. 146; Art Journal, 1869, p. 272; Catalogues of the Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy; Catalogues of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1852–68.]
CRAWFORD, WILLIAM SHARMAN (1781–1861), politician, was eldest son of William Sharman of Moira Castle, co. Down, a protestant landed proprietor who was for many years M.P. for Lisburn in the Irish parliament, was colonel of a union regiment of volunteers, and died in 1803. William, born 3 Sept. 1781, married, 5 Dec. 1805, Mabel Fridiswid, daughter and heiress of John Crawford of Crawfordsburn, and Rademon, co. Down, and assumed by royal license the additional surname of Crawford. In 1811 he served as sheriff of Down, and in the following years persistently advocated Roman catholic emancipation. Crawford was meanwhile seeking to improve the condition of his tenants on his large Ulster estates, and he gave the fullest possible recognition to the Ulster tenant-right custom. His tenants often sold their tenant-right for sums equalling the value of the fee-simple. About 1830 Crawford resolved to agitate for the conversion of the Ulster custom into a legal enactment, and for its extension to the whole of Ireland. Tenant farmers in the north of Ireland eagerly accepted his leadership, and in 1835 he was returned to parliament as member for Dundalk. On 2 July 1835 he opened his campaign in the House of Commons by bringing forward a bill to compensate evicted tenants for improvements. Owing to the lateness of the session, the bill was dropped and reintroduced next session (10 March 1836), but it never reached a second reading.
Crawford rapidly declared himself an advanced radical on all political questions. On 31 May 1837 he attended a chartist meeting in London, and not only accepted all the principles of the chartist petition, but declared that there was no impracticability about any of them. He was one of the committee appointed to draft the bills embodying the chartist demands (Lovett, Autobiography, p. 114). With O'Connell Crawford was never on good terms. Their temperaments were antipathetic. Crawford declined to support O'Connell's agitation for the repeal of the union, and he was consequently rejected by O'Connell's influence at Dundalk after the dissolution of 1837. In the first session of the new parliament (1838) Lord Melbourne's government passed, with O'Connell's assistance, the Irish Tithe Bill, which commuted tithe into a rent-charge, at the same time as it reduced tithe by twenty-five per cent. Crawford at once denounced the measure as a sacrifice of the tenants' interests. Soon after it had passed he met O'Connell at a public meeting at Dublin, and charged him with sacrificing Ireland to an alliance between himself and the whigs. O'Connell
