Tanner (Robin)

based on sketches made on a moonlit night in the Cotswold village of Castle Combe, in Wiltshire, Tanner issued the resulting etching in its first state in 1929. Robin Tanner (1904-1988) trained at Goldsmith’s College, London, where he and a number of notable fellow students, including Paul Drury and Graham Sutherland, were heavily influenced by the recently revived interest in the visionary pastoral works of the Shoreham period of William Blake’s disciple, Samuel Palmer. In 1931, Tanner married Heather Spackman, and in 1932 they built a home together, Old Chapel Field, in Kington Langley near Chippenham in Wiltshire, where he established his press. His early printmaking career was largely put on hold, though, from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, while he pursued a highly successful and influential career in education, but was thereafter very frutifully revived right up until he died. A second state of this plate, Christmas, was published in an edition of 50 by the Penn Print Room in 1974, before a more limited edition of 12 signed copies was published by Garton & Cooke in 1982, who later issued a posthumous edition of a further 100.

Etching in the second and final state, on cream wove paper, 330 x 275 mm. (13 x 10 3/4 in), signed in pencil, lower centre, from the edition of 12, [Garton 9 II], 

Provenance: the collection of James Roose-Evans, founder of the Bleddfa Trust which hosted the exhibition ‘Robin Tanner: Etcher’, organised in conjunction with the artist who sadly passed away nine days before the opening in May, 1988. This plate with The Fine Art Society, ‘Pastoral Essay: An Exhibition of Printmaking in the English Pastoral Tradition from William Blake to Robin Tanner’, June-July, 2002,