Norman Stevens ARA

Norman Stevens RA (1937–1988) was a British painter and printmaker whose work combined meticulous observation with a strong sense of atmosphere, mystery and place. Although he began his career as a painter, he became particularly celebrated for his prints, in which gardens, landscapes, houses, trees and architectural details were transformed through subtle variations of light, shadow and surface.

Born in Bradford, Stevens studied at Bradford Regional College of Art from 1952 to 1957 alongside David Hockney, John Loker and David Oxtoby. The friendships formed there proved enduring. Stevens was the first of the group to continue his studies in London, entering the Royal College of Art in 1957, where he studied painting and won both the Lloyd Landscape Scholarship and the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship.

He remained particularly close to David Hockney, and in 1965 travelled across the United States by bus with Hockney, Patrick Procktor and Colin Self. Stevens later returned to America, meeting Hockney in California in 1969. These friendships placed him within a wider circle of artists whose careers developed in very different directions but who remained closely connected personally and artistically.

Stevens first established his reputation as a painter. His work was acquired early by the Arts Council, British Council and Tate, and in 1974 he was appointed Gregory Fellow in Painting at the University of Leeds. He was included in important survey exhibitions including British Painting 1952–1977 at the Royal Academy and the first British Art Show in 1979.

From the early 1970s, printmaking became increasingly central to his practice. A visit to California inspired some of his earliest mature prints, in which flowers and foliage appear against the façades of clapboard houses. By the middle of the decade he was looking increasingly towards the English landscape, formal gardens and historic sites such as Stonehenge. His images became more lyrical and Romantic while retaining a characteristic sense of stillness and unease.

Stevens worked closely with the master printers James Collyer and John Crossley of JC Editions, who printed virtually all his intaglio works from 1972 to 1984, and later with Brad Faine at Coriander Studio. He explored etching, aquatint, mezzotint, lithography and screenprinting with considerable technical ambition. A retrospective of his prints was held at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 1975, followed by an exhibition at Tate in 1978.

The Redfern Gallery first exhibited Stevens in 1978, when John McEwen described him as “a master of the craft”. Two years later the gallery mounted a major retrospective comprising more than sixty prints from the previous decade, together with recent paintings. Stevens continued to exhibit with Redfern throughout the 1980s.

In 1979 Stevens became the first artist to win multiple prizes at the British International Print Biennale, and he won a further prize there in 1982. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1983 specifically for his contribution to printmaking. His image of Levens Hall Garden was selected as the principal image for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1985.

Stevens died in 1988 at the age of fifty-one. The Redfern Gallery continued to represent his work after his death, mounting a memorial exhibition in 1989 and, in 2008, a tribute exhibition in which his work was shown alongside new paintings by his old Bradford friends David Hockney, John Loker, David Oxtoby and Michael Vaughan. A further major Redfern exhibition in 2023 accompanied the publication of Norman Stevens: The Complete Prints, the first catalogue raisonné of his graphic work.

A retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2014 confirmed Stevens’s reputation as one of the outstanding British printmakers of his generation. His work is held in more than fifty public collections internationally, including Tate, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Australia and the Yale Center for British Art.