Daphne Reynolds

Painter/printmaker who helped revive the mezzotint

Daphne Dent, painter and engraver: born Huddersfield, Yorkshire 12 January 1918; married 1943 Graham Reynolds; died Bradfield St George, Suffolk 12 December 2002.

Circumstances prevented Daphne Reynolds from making a serious early start on her artistic career, yet eventually she broke through to win the esteem of her peers. As a painter she had a fine sense of colour and tonal gradations, worked with assurance in various media and enthusiastically met the challenge of new subjects at home and abroad.

Reynolds was middle-aged before she became a printmaker, but was to exhibit widely and gain admission to major collections. In particular, she contributed to the revival of that subtle print form the mezzotint, striving to emulate the best work by past and present practitioners.

She was born in Huddersfield in 1918, the daughter of Thomas Dent, a photographer, and his wife Florence (Haskett). As a young man, Dent became so enthused by photography that he ran away to London, abandoning lace design studies at Nottingham Polytechnic. By the time that Daphne was studying at Huddersfield College of Art, the Depression was undermining the now ageing Thomas's portrait-photography business, pushing him to the edge of bankruptcy. Daphne joined him, becoming a member of the Professional Photographers' Association. She enjoyed the work, but remained a thwarted painter.

The constant stream of photographic subjects and the peculiar surroundings of Burlington House in Huddersfield, where they lived and worked, nourished her visual awareness. Built in the 1870s by John Edward Shaw, it had a fine studio, many attics and cellars, a statue brandishing a lamp on a wall and a grotto with a waterfall and two pools. Adding to its eeriness and oddness was the suspicion at night that a violin was being played, if not by her father perhaps by the ghost of Shaw's son, who had committed suicide there.

In 1951, Daphne transferred from Huddersfield to London with wartime Civil Defence. Its regional headquarters was the Geological Museum, where she met the young art historian Graham Reynolds, marrying him in 1943. Reynolds became Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, and of Paintings, at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1959-74), and a prolific author. Among his landmark books would be studies of Victorian painters, of Turner and Constable and of portrait miniatures in the Wallace Collection, the Metropolitan Museum and those owned by the Queen.

By the 1950s, Daphne Reynolds was able to paint seriously again, contributing to mixed exhibitions in London and Paris. To make up for lost time she worked regularly and hard, totally engaged. Years later she overheard mention of an artist who lamented the lack of time to paint. Her blunt Yorkshire reaction was: "Well, if he wants to paint he will bloody well do it!" For her, painting was the priority.

Her watercolours of the 1950s depicted subjects that remained familiar in her work: landscapes and studies of plants and animals. Outlined in Indian ink, they were in a style short-lived for her: rather Neo-Romantic, reminiscent of painters such as Graham Sutherland, John Minton and Keith Vaughan. Like many other British artists, in the late 1950s Reynolds felt the impact of American Abstract Expressionism. In the picture Treasury of Atreus, the tomb at Mycenae partly dissolves into abstract sweeps of colour. However, what she saw around her remained a key element in her work.

In 1968, when her husband was a visiting professor at Yale, she grew bored with Connecticut, hired a car and wandered off through America. There was an extended visit to Arizona and New Mexico, including a stay with the Hopi Indians. Her love of desert scenery was fostered. For the next few years, nourished by many sketches which she had done on the spot, she produced a series of small, powerful Indian ink and gouache pictures in strong colours, her reaction to the arid landscapes and fierce sunsets of southern America.

When in 1973 Graham Reynolds had to go to New Zealand and Australia to oversee a touring exhibition, Daphne accompanied him and took a journey into the outback. The landscape around Alice Springs, Ayers Rock and Mount Olga "really stirred her up", he recalls, as did visits to Thailand and especially Iran, where she produced lovely Isfahan desert scenes.

By this time, Daphne Reynolds was embarked on a new career as a printmaker, having studied with Anthony Gross at the Slade School of Fine Art. She admired Gross both as an engraver and painter, collecting his works. Paintings by J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and Atkinson Grimshaw, the abstract black-and-white photographs of Bill Brandt and the large mezzotints of the Japanese artist Hamaguchi give an idea of the catholicity of her enthusiasms.

Gross had encouraged Reynolds herself to make mezzotints. They present a particular technical challenge to the printmaker. In the 19th century, the mezzotint technique's rich, velvety, luminous shadows made it especially suitable for reproducing oil paintings for wide distribution, but into the 20th century the vogue for mezzotints disappeared. Reynolds was included in Colnaghi's important exhibition "The Mezzotint Rediscovered" in 1974 and became noted for her essays in this medium. She featured in "80 Prints by Modern Masters", at Angela Flowers Gallery (1982); contributed to the publication A Tribute to Birgit Skiöld (1983); and at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1985-86) won the Barcham Green Award.

A trip by the Reynoldses to Japan in the 1980s enhanced Daphne's interest in the medium. Shinto shrines and Mount Fuji were new subjects to tackle for her tiny black-and-white mezzotints. Otherwise, commonly the object treated is something found around the house, such as a flat-iron, candles, icing cones and tape measures – all given her meticulous and visionary treatment.

Reynolds was a frequent contributor to the "Small is Beautiful" series of exhibitions at Flowers East gallery. Her hand-coloured mezzotint End of the Voyage is in the current show. She was a fellow of the Printmakers' Council, a founder member of Gainsborough's House Print Workshop in Sudbury (its first chairman) and chairman for several years of the Women's International Art Club.

She had over two dozen solo shows, her 80th birthday exhibition at Chappel Galleries, near Colchester, in 1998 showing an enormous variety of work over five decades. She was pleased when a few years ago Robert Howard, one of the editors of the 1999 volume Late Onset Schizophrenia, asked to reproduce one of her paintings on its cover. It was one held by the Government Art Collection that had been chosen by Harold Wilson, when Prime Minister, to hang in his study in 10 Downing Street.

"In the foreground is a rather sinister figure looking at three other sinister black figures in the middle distance," says Graham Reynolds:

She called it The Watcher, but for Wilson it became The Watchers. The book says that he was undoubtedly a clinical case, obsessed with the clandestine activities of the security services, believing that his light socket was bugged, and so on.

David Buckman