(b Urswick, Lancs, 23 June 1707; d Urswick, 28 Oct 1780). English painter. A self-taught artist who began work as a plasterer, by the 1730s or 1740s he was in London, where he attended the St Martin’s Lane Academy. After marrying an heiress in c. 1744, he set up a studio in Bloomsbury Square. His earliest known paintings are portraits of Foster Cunliffe and Mrs Foster Cunliffe (priv. col., see Dibdin, pp. 203, 206). The seated full-length portrait of the well-known bookseller Thomas Osborne (1747; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.) is among his rare signed works and has the solid accomplishment of contemporary portraits by Thomas Hudson, with something of William Hogarth’s realism as well. The quality of the drapery painting, however, suggests that (unlike Hudson) Cranke did this part of the work himself.