Robin Tanner was born in Bristol in 1904. He was educated at Chippenham Grammar School in Willtshire. The year 1924 saw the publication of Laurence Binyon’s book The Followers of William Blake and in 1926, Martin Hardie organised a retrospective of Samuel Palmer’s work at the V&A. Inspired by these developments, Tanner began taking night-school classes at Goldsmiths’ College in south London. Shortly thereafter, he produced his first etching, a barn interior influenced by George Clausen. At that time, a group of full-time printmaking students at Goldsmiths’ were struggling to find their aesthetic identity by studying Old Master prints of the 16th and 17th centuries. They included Paul Drury, William Larkins and Graham Sutherland. Having commenced his studies part-time, Tanner was a late addition to their number. Some of the teaching staff expressed concern about the direction the group were taking and Tanner quickly found himself under the wing of Stanley Anderson (1884-1966), who was both a stern critic and a hard taskmaster. Tanner’s second etching Alington in Wiltshire contained many of the elements which would become his trademark: a barn, farmyard, hayricks, chapel and Wiltshire elms. The following year, Tanner produced 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 Tanner’s career, all the more so, because it demonstrated 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 in the way of Tanner. His great etching, Christmas, came too late for an etching market which would be virtually extinguished by the Great Depression. In 1930 Tanner began teaching at Chippenham. The following year, he married Heather Spackman (and designed her wedding dress). They moved to Old Chapel Field outside Chippenham and lived there for the rest of their lives. Many of Tanner’s best plates date from the 1930s, such as Harvest Festival, Autumn, Hedge Flowers and Wiltshire Rickyard. During the latter part of that decade, he worked with his wife on a book commissioned by Collins called Wiltshire Village. In 1924 Tanner 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 produced some quite astonishing work using Cizek’s theories. Such was the standard of work produced, that when shown at a teachers’ conference in 1936, Tanner was derided as having produced it himself. In 1935 he was appointed Inspector of Schools, in which role, he continued until 1964. Tanner believed that the study of natural things and the exploration of arts and crafts, music and poetry were essential for the development of teachers and children. At the Ministry of Education, he ran courses for primary school teachers, in concert with the progressive educationalist Christian Schiller. There were occasional further etchings up to 1946, but no more until 1970. The Tanners them worked on the book Woodland Plants, Heather writing the description of the 69 plants and Robin producing the black and white illustrations. Tanner retired from the world of work in 1964, but was prevented from getting back to etching until 1970 by a host of other distractions, 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 recognition began for his work when Joe Graffy republished some of his etchings in a portfolio in 1974. 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 19th-century view of printmaking. 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. The Catalogue Raisonné of Tanner’s etchings was published shortly after his death and was based on an irreplaceable collection of proofs and drawings. 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. Tanner died in 1988.