Norman Ackroyd, who has died aged 86, was the outstanding etcher of his generation, renowned for creating images of spectacular British landscapes that he produced with breathtaking technical mastery.
To do so he undertook a remarkable series of journeys in search of landscapes of the greatest drama. He found them mostly in the extremities of the British Isles, from south-west Ireland to the Outer Hebrides, where he relished the adventure of hiring a boat to make the 35-mile crossing to St Kilda.
Typically he loved to depict gaunt cliffs towering above a foaming ocean, with sea-birds wheeling between the two. He rarely included people, thus presenting his landscapes in a pure, timeless state, devoid of human impact, where the evanescent had paradoxically become permanent.
Forever refining his etching techniques, Norman displayed a fine variety and subtlety of tones. His works were collected by the major galleries of Europe and the US, including the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 2007 he was made CBE.
Born in Leeds, he was the son of Clara (nee Briggs), a weaver, and Albert, a master butcher who felt that to be an artist was no fit job for a Yorkshireman. Norman was eight when an older brother took him fishing in the Yorkshire Dales, where he was entranced by the patterns of light on the water, which he tried to sketch. He received vital encouragement from his mother, who first insisted he learn to play the piano, then, after he had attended Cockburn high school, helped to steer him to Leeds Art College.
At 23 he proceeded to the Royal College of Art in London, where he met his future wife, the artist Sylvia Buckland. Also there were Mary Quant, Zandra Rhodes and David Hockney.
In 1965 Norman started part-time teaching at the Central School of Arts, where he was appreciated for his gentle, intuitive approach. Settling in Clapham, south London, with Sylvia, whom he had married in 1963, he had his first solo show in 1970, but soon gained a painful insight into the ruthlessness of the art world when he gave a Bond Street dealer exclusive rights to his work. When the dealer rejected an entire year’s output, Norman was left all but destitute. Thereafter he resolved to run his own marketing operation, selling his prints and watercolours at affordable prices, although he later also sold through galleries. He held open studio events each Christmas, relaxed social occasions that boosted his sales.
After he and Sylvia divorced in 1975, he moved to Bermondsey in south-east London, where he converted a derelict four-storey warehouse into a studio and home combined. He shared it with a new partner, Penny Hughes-Stanton, an author and later a gallery owner.
It was there that Norman worked his technical magic, which required him to inscribe his image – in reverse – on a copper plate which he had covered with a layer of wax. Then he doused the plate with acid that ate into the exposed parts. Finally he inked the plate ready for printing, experimenting endlessly with variants of wax, resin or mutton fat. He talked of using a “palette of acids” and debated the respective properties of nitric and hydrochloric.
He would sometimes make up to 20 versions of a print on the giant Victorian presses in his studio before he was satisfied. He could perfectly render a line of mountains fading into the distance or a farm gate seen through a snowstorm, but always felt he had more to learn. “I feel I’m coming to the end of my apprenticeship,” he told me in the late 1980s, after 25 years at work.
Norman was elected a Royal Academician in 1991 (having been made associate in 1988), and helped to hang its summer shows. He published a new set of themed etchings each year, sometimes in collaboration with poets such as Douglas Dunn and William McIlvanney, and engraved metal murals for clients including Lloyds Bank, British Airways and the British embassy in Moscow. He also produced a series of prints of the wine chateaux of Bordeaux, a project that led to a friendship with the Guardian’s cricket correspondent and radio commentator John Arlott, a fellow wine connoisseur.
Norman worked into his 80s, continuing even after he was diagnosed with cancer. Acutely aware that his generation did not have to pay student fees, he set up a foundation that plans to award grants to promising print-making students. His last work, completed in August, was a sensuous watercolour landscape for a nearby restaurant in what has become gastronomic Bermondsey.
With a craggy face and clear blue eyes, Norman was affable and welcoming, with a marked Yorkshire accent that was undiminished throughout his life. He also had a steely self-belief and determination to succeed.
I first met him in the early 60s, when he and Sylvia became near neighbours to me and my wife, Leni, in Clapham. They were renting a flat in which Norman had an improvised studio in the front room, and were strapped for cash. We once gave them a second-hand fridge, which Norman paid for with an etching.
Discovering a shared love of cricket, I inducted him into Private Eye magazine’s cricket team, Lord Gnome’s XI, and we played together into our 60s. In 1986, while appearing for Lord Gnome against the Oxfordshire village of Swinbrook, he took seven wickets with his guileful medium-paced bowling. The match was a tie, both teams scoring 197, and Norman produced a celebratory etching.
Titled The Great Match, it depicted the players in the bucolic surroundings of the Windrush Valley, a line of willows providing a backdrop. He included the scorecard, with his bowling figures of 7-55, and admitted to me, with a wink, that the whole enterprise was “a disgraceful act of self-indulgence”.
Leni and I last saw him four weeks before he died. He talked with pride about his latest watercolour and then, on learning we had seen Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Proms, rose from his couch to sit at his piano to play and sing Dido’s Lament.
He is survived by Penny, their two children, Poppy and Simeon, and the two daughters from his marriage, Felicity and Justine.
• Norman Ackroyd, artist, born 26 March 1938; died 16 September 2024
• This article was amended on 27 September 2024. Norman Ackroyd’s mother was Clara rather than Clare, and the embassy was in Moscow rather than Washington.
