FOR more than 50 years Robert Tavener enjoyed a highly successful and distinguished career as a painter, printmaker, draughtsman and art educator. It is difficult to single out a particular point or event as the greatest of his achievements. He had some 35 solo exhibitions; he exhibited with the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition every year for 34 years; his work is included in more than 25 public collections in the UK alone, including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museum of Wales; he was the recipient of the Lord Mayor’s award for art in 1970, 1973 and again in 1977.
Yet despite his accomplishments, Tavener suffered terrible self-doubt over his work, finding it difficult to believe or accept the accolades that were so often and so sincerely heaped upon him. At times he would refuse even to address the buyers who would seek him out at his exhibition openings.
Taverner was born in 1920 in Hampstead and first had the opportunity to pursue his interest in art when he was serving in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War; for eight months from June 1945 he was able to embark on art training at Göttingen University.
When he returned to England he continued his art education, studying first at the Hornsey College of Art, where he earned a national diploma in design, specialising in lithography, and later at London University, where he gained his art teacher’s diploma.
Tavener subsequently taught art for many years at Medway College of Art in Rochester, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and finally at the Eastbourne College of Art and Design, where he served both as head of printmaking, illustration and graphic design and as vice-principal.
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Until he finally retired from teaching in 1980, Tavener combined his work as a teacher with his freelance activities as an artist. He was much sought-out by collectors and patrons alike, and indeed a great deal of his work was specially commissioned by organisations such as the Oxford University Press, London Transport, the BBC, American Express, Sainsburys, Marks & Spencer, McDonalds, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Prudential, among many others.
He was best known for his print-making, and was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1966. The printmaking studio in his home in Eastbourne contained the rare Albion Press, cast in 1882, which he used to create quality fine prints, each individually engraved, rolled, proofed and printed in a signed edition of no more than 75 prints. Parallel with his printmaking work, Tavener also produced a long series of finely executed watercolours of the areas of England which he loved best, including Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, York, the Cotswolds and the region of Eastbourne where he and his wife Catherine lived for 50 years.
After Catherine’s death in 1998, Tavener’s own health began to fail and he worked less and less. He was forced to abandon his heavy and onerous printmaking equipment, limiting himself to the occasional watercolour in his later years.
Tavener described his own work as: “English countryside and English architecture. Shape, pattern, colour, texture, design. In other words, my subject matter is a personal interpretation of the richness, variety, beauty, and the underlying relationship with the past, of our landscape and building.”
Although he himself worried that such subject matter made his work old-fashioned, this was an anxiety which was not shared by the art lovers, students and collectors who greatly admired his work — bold and colourful paintings and prints, born of of years of close observation and a deeply felt love of painting and drawing.
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He is survived by a daughter.
Robert Tavener, artist, was born on July 6, 1920. He died on July 12, 2004, aged 84.