Bryan Ingham

Bryan Ingham was born at Preston on 11 June 1936 and raised at Totley in Yorkshire's Calder Valley, in one of its many terraced houses, and the surrounding moorlands, a landscape that profoundly marked his later artistic language.

On leaving school he worked for a time in a department store and acquired an affection for the business's traditional standards and his fellow workers.

He was an enthusiastic cricketer and had a trial for Yorkshire; it was he said one of his regrets that having been born in a hospital two or three miles into Lancashire he was disqualified from playing for the county but as he was not selected this remained purely a sentiment.

He went up to London's St Martin's School of Art, where he had the tuition of a fine post-war generation of teachers who helped him to hone his draughtsmanship and other skills, and he swiftly showed a capacity for painting that drew the attention of his tutors and peers.

Ingham was to become one of the most notable etchers of the second half of the 20th century, remarkable for the size and quality of his plates, which he often attacked in a style he called "quarrying."

Ingham had been fascinated by Italy since his youth, undeterred by an early and disastrous visit with Leslie, who during the trip started the descent into the madness that ultimately led to his suicide.

Ingham applied for and received a Leverhulme travel award to explore the sites of the great Renaissance painters, and spent many happy months engaged in this expedition, and as a parenthesis turned up at the English Art school in Rome, where he lived well and busied himself the same studio that Barbara Hepworth had used.

His trips to London, always dapper in country suit and bow-tie, on selling expeditions, were usually successful and always convivial, ritually ending with a very hot curry and the sleeper back to Penzance.

He had many love affairs over the years, two of which were long-term relationships and he was married in 1989 (marriage dissolved 1994) to Aysel Özakın, a writer and poet of Turkish/British nationality, who figures in a number of his etchings and portraits of the period.

His friendship with Josephine Gooden resulted in his conversion of a barn adjoining her Lizard farmhouse and he lived there for some years in more comfort than in his cottage which he nonetheless always retained.

He moved from there into a fine set of barn-type studios with a patch of garden, a former orchard, quietly situated off the High St in Helston, and it was here, on 22 September 1997, that he died, having stoically endured cancer for nearly a year.