Richard Bawden, artist acclaimed for his fine craftsmanship, crisp line and quirky humour – obituary

Richard Bawden, who has died aged 88, was an artist whose work crossed the border between fine art and design; he was prolific in a wide variety of media including watercolours, etchings and lino-cut prints, murals, posters, etched glass, mosaics, cast-iron furniture, book illustration – and even tea towels.

His father was Edward Bawden (1903-1989), the famous war artist and illustrator who, together with his great friend Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), carved a special niche in art history for design and illustration. Richard and his sister Joanna grew up in the north-west Essex village of Great Bardfield which, between about 1930 and 1970, became the home of a large number of artists who, though not a formal school, shared a preference for figurative art even as they differed widely in style.

Although the artists of Great Bardfield made an impression on Richard, he was more influenced by his tutors at the Royal College of Art and by contemporaries including David Hockney and Ridley Scott.

His work was characterised by its fine craftsmanship, its crisp and quirkily humorous line, his delight in pattern and decoration and its innate sense of geometry. His paintings and prints, drawn from life, often depicting the countryside and buildings round his home in Suffolk, scenes from the Suffolk and Essex coast, or scenes of domesticity, such as his house, his garden and its plants and birds (together with a succession of tabby cats), suggest an artist at ease with himself and with life.

One of two children, Richard Bawden was born at Black Notley, near Braintree in Essex, on March 18 1936, to Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte, née Epton. His godfather was Thomas Hennell (1903-45), who was killed while serving as an official war artist in the Second World War.

A Richard Bawden linocut from 1992 conveys some of the gently bohemian atmosphere of the artistic milieu in which he was brought up. A Splash in the Pant portrays Edward and Charlotte Bawden and Eric and Tirzah Ravilious taking a naked dip on a summer’s day in the river near Great Bardfield, observed with interest by cows and ducks, a tabby cat (a favourite subject and frequent intruder in Richard’s work) and by the local bobby, who seems uncertain whether to intervene or turn a blind eye.

Richard was not close to his father as Edward had little time for children. “I think my relationship with Edward was impersonal in as much as he didn’t show his feelings, not demonstrative, never a kiss or a cuddle,” Richard told Malcolm Yorke, author of Richard Bawden: His Life & Work (2016).

Perhaps his closest relationship was with “Buttle”, a local woman who was in charge of Richard and his sister Joanna, pushing them round in an old-fashioned pram “that had a cubbyhole in the centre for dolls and things like earwigs and worms which we kept in boxes...

“My earliest memory is of her lifting a huge sweet jar off the shelf. The place was lit by oil lamps and it was cosy.” He recalled her as a fount of folk wisdom: “She told me a cure for whooping cough was to go to bed with a kipper tied round your neck and a cure for St Vitus’s Dance was to be taken round a sheep fold at crack of dawn.”

Richard had a happy and productive time at Bryanston School, forming lifelong friendships with the potter Richard Batterham and others.

He went on to study painting, printmaking and graphic design at Chelsea and St Martin’s Schools of Art. During National Service he was able to attend Winchester School of Art, and then became a student in the school of engraving and etching at the Royal College of Art. Later he taught drawing and printmaking at several art schools in London and the provinces.

Kind and generous, with a quiet humour, Bawden inspired his students with his broadminded approach to art and life; many became lifelong friends.

He never strayed far from his Great Bardfield roots, settling in Hadleigh, over the county border in Suffolk, where he bore people’s curiosity about his father – and artistic comparisons – with good grace.

Over his long career Richard Bawden had more than 50 one-man exhibitions, including retrospectives at Gainsborough’s House Gallery in Sudbury, Suffolk (of whose print workshop he was a former chairman), and the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex, and he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy Summer show. Though very popular with collectors, he kept his prices down, resolutely rejecting the overtures of dealers wanting to raise them.

He also served on the Royal Watercolour Society council, was an elected member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, a member of the New English Art Club and a founder-member of the Suffolk Group of Artists.

Examples of Richard Bawden’s work are held by the V&A, the Tate, the Royal Collection, the Ashmolean and the Government Art Collection. An exhibition of his most recent work opens at the Bircham Gallery, Holt, Norfolk, on June 15. As a friend remarked: “He was such a gentle man and somehow kept a childlike enthusiasm into old age.”

In 1987 Richard Bawden married Harriet “Hattie” Brown, a potter, who survives him with a son and a daughter from an earlier marriage.

Richard Bawden, born March 18 1936, died May 31 2024