In 2002, Emma Mason was asked by her friend, the veteran printmaker Robert Tavener, to put his life’s work into some sort of order, a job that she reckoned would take about a year. “He was in his eighties, and the task was beyond him,” she says.
The artist died in 2004, and his daughter, Mary, asked Mason to take care of his entire archive, and to oversee the sale of his remaining prints. Twenty years on, there are still limitededition Taveners on sale on the walls of her plush Eastbourne selling gallery, among print works of other (largely British, largely 20th-century) artists.
Tavener, originally a Londoner, moved to Sussex in 1953 to teach at Eastbourne Art School, where he was given a day off every week to pursue his career as a printmaker, specialising in linocuts and lithographs. He spent most of his free time at his artwork: either out sketching and plein-air watercolour painting; or cutting the prints; or at his press, producing hundreds of editions for an expanding number of collectors in the ‘art for all’ period in which the medium was booming.
He was also successful as a commercial artist, as national companies, such as British Rail and London Transport, were in that era committed to commissioning artists to design posters for their advertising campaigns. He produced magazine covers for Lilliput, Homes & Gardens and The Listener, plus illustrations for the likes of Methuen and Penguin.
But it’s his fine-artwork for which he is best known today. “He was an extremely talented draftsman,” says Mason, “who had a finely tuned sense of place, and the ability to get across the tone and mood of the English landscape and of English architecture. He was also extremely technically adept, an absolute master of the mechanics of his medium.”
Tavener was passionate about Sussex, avowing that if it weren’t for commercial constraints, he would happily spend all his time in Eastbourne and the countryside around it. His home town features strongly in his work, as do Brighton and Hastings, and the South Downs. The artist rarely held exhibitions outside the county, organising his own shows – which were highly successful in terms of sales – in small venues.
The artist’s prints enjoy enormous cachet among Sussex-based collectors, but, largely thanks to Emma Mason’s hard work, the artist’s worth is nowadays recognised nationally, and, indeed, globally. “A lot of our sales,” she says, “are to buyers from the USA, Australia and New Zealand.”
Part of Mason’s Tavener archive will never be put up for sale. Among all the prints in the archive, Mason discovered scores of pages the artist had pulled from his sketchbooks, featuring quickly executed drawings he’d made throughout his career, since he was a young WW2 veteran, training at Hornsey School of Art. These were wrapped in sheets of paper, on which he’d written: ‘50 years of sketches. Please do not destroy’, and ‘My seed corn over 40 years!’
Mason was kind enough to let us delve into those sketches, and choose a number to reproduce here, as the first in our series examining Sussex artists’ sketchbooks. Most of them have never been published before. These elegant visual vignettes often found their way, in one form or another, into Tavener’s final prints. Of which the artist stated: “You have to be careful not to think of them as portraits of specific places. They are usually an amalgam of my drawings and paintings made into a sort of summing up of a landscape.”