ROBIN TANNER
1904-1988

LIMITED TO 1,000 COPIES

Robin Tanner The Etchings
by Robin Garton
1988
ISBN: 0 906030 21 8
154 pages; 193 illustrations
Page size: 250 x 310 mm; 12¼ x 9¾ inches
Dustjacket; straw-coloured buckram, gold-blocked spine.
£75

Robin Tanner was brought up in Wiltshire and trained as a teacher at the University of London, Goldsmiths' College from 1922. His first etching was made in 1926 - a barn interior influenced by George Clausen. Before this there had been Rackhamish watercolours and some strange pen and ink drawings reminiscent of Beardsley. At this time a group of printmaking students at Goldsmiths' were self-consciously struggling to find their aesthetic identity by studying Old Master prints of the 16th and 17th centuries. This group included Paul Drury, William Larkins and Graham Sutherland. Larkins was tipped to be the star of the generation.

Some of the teaching staff expressed concern about the Palmerish direction this group was beginning to take, which was against all current fashion. Robin Tanner found himself under Stanley Anderson's tutelage. Anderson was helpful technically but ruthless in his criticism of Robin Tanner's style and content. Tanner's second etching Alington in Wiltshire was also made in 1926 when he was still only 22 years old. It contained many of the elements which are to be found in his future prints: a barn, farmyard, hayricks, chapel and great Wiltshire elms. Anderson could not imagine trees like them and told Robin Tanner to 'look again'.

The year 1924 had seen the publication of Laurence Binyon's book, The Followers of William Blake, and in 1926 Martin Hardie organised the exhibition Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts made by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake at the V&A. The following year Robin Tanner made one of his most important prints, Martin's Hovel. Anderson criticised the composition and the sun as a 'blasted search light'. But the print set the scene for Robin Tanner's career, all the more so because it shows the beginnings of William Morris's influence in his work.

It must also have been Morris's influence which initiated a series of etchings on Wiltshire craftsmen which Anderson finally criticised out of existence. Only four of the proposed series were made and the first took three separate attempts. Some of these prints were exhibited by Molly Bernard Smith at the XXI Gallery but while she was successful in selling Drury, Sutherland and Badmin, she never sold much for Robin Tanner. His great etching, Christmas, came too late for an etching market which was beginning to suffer the effects of speculation and which was to be virtually extinguished by the economic crises of the 1930s.

In 1930 Robin Tanner resumed his teaching career in Chippenham, Wiltshire, not so much as a refugee from the recession but because it was what he most wanted to do. The following year he married Heather Spackman and they moved into the house they built outside Chippenham, Old Chapel Field, where Kilvert's ancestors lie buried. They lived there for the rest of their lives.

Many of Tanner's greatest plates date from the 1930s, such as Harvest Festival, Autumn, Hedge Flowers and Wiltshire Rickyard. During the latter part of that decade he was also working with Heather on a book commissioned by Collins to be called Wiltshire Village. This was for a specific market which had grown up during the 1920s and 30s for illustrated country books: Clare Leighton's Country Matters is but one example of this vogue.

The other preoccupation of the 1930s for the Tanners was the teaching of art to children. In 1924 he had discovered a pamphlet by Francesca Wilson, The Child as Artist: Some Conversations with Professor Cizek. Under Tanner's tutelage children in the Ivy Lane school at Chippenham produced some quite astonishing work using Cizek's theories. These pictures have a clear and distilled sense of design and outline and also have great qualities of movement and balance of colour. (They are now preserved by the Edwin Young Trust in Salisbury.) Such was the standard of work that when shown at a teachers' conference in 1936 he was derided as having done it himself. By 1935 he had been appointed an Inspector of Schools in which role he continued throughout the war and until 1964. His attitude to teaching became influential in many parts of Britain where he was an inspector.

There were occasional further etchings up to 1946 but then no more until 1970. Wiltshire Village became briefly a bestseller before stocks were bombed out. At this time the Tanners had also started their next book, Woodland Plants, Heather writing a description of 69 plants and Robin working on very large numbers of drawings of specimens so that he could draw a typical plant rather than one particular example of the species. These drawings again show a strong William Morris influence and are drawn in black and white, pen and ink, at actual size in the context of their surroundings. The book finally appeared 1981.
Robin Tanner retired in 1964 but was prevented from getting back to etching until 1970 by a host of other retirement occupations including the setting up of the Crafts Study Centre in Bath. In fact over half his etched output falls into the second half of his life and new recognition began for his work when Joe Graffy republished some of his etchings in a portfolio in 1974. Robin Tanner's attitude to printmaking was that a print was a way of forming an image so that it could become more widely available. While he accepted that editions have to have some form of limitation for practical reasons, he felt that the only purpose of cancelling an etching plate was to give the etching a cachet which it otherwise would not have. This was a well-accepted nineteenth-century view of printmaking. Robin Tanner felt that prints could have different editions in the same way as books. All the editions have been carefully recorded in the catalogue of his work and the etching plates are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

In the dozen years that we were their publishers we were never allowed to pay the Tanners any money. Royalties were instead donated to the many conservationist causes which they espoused, some of them surprisingly radical. Perhaps the most tangible result of their efforts was the setting up of the Crafts Study Centre in the Holburne Museum, Bath, where a library has recently been opened in their memory.

The Catalogue Raisonné of Robin Tanner's etchings was written and published shortly after his death and was based on an irreplaceable collection of proofs and drawings at Old Chapelfield. The catalogue illustrates each of the 51 prints in at least one state, together with many of the drawings and photographs used by the artist to compose the subject.

The illustrations are laid out in chronological sequence; at the end of the book a catalogue details the states and editions of each of the prints.