A love of the art and architecture and landscape of Italy has for generations informed the great tradition of British watercolour painting. It was a tradition continued with great depth of feeling by the artist David Gluck. Every spring he and his wife spent a month in the village of Petrognano near Lucca in Tuscany, working al fresco from 7am — invariably fortified by the coffee, wine and biscuits given by the local people they had come to know as friends.

When in 2006 his landscape The Evening Sunlight, Petrognano was awarded first prize in the Singer and Friedlander/Sunday Times watercolour competition at the Mall Galleries it was a fitting culmination to Gluck’s career.

David Gluck was born in Pontefract in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1939. His great-grandfather was an immigrant German stonemason; both his grandfather and father were picture-framers. After attending the King’s Grammar School, Pontefract, he studied at Wakefield College of Art and then at Leeds College of Art from 1959 to 1961.

In 1962 he went to the Royal College of Art in London to take a postgraduate diploma in printmaking, his first love. Becoming a teacher in 1974 he went to the Central School of Art and Design in the Tottenham Court Road as head of printmaking, where from 1990 until his retirement in 1994 he was director of studies on the fine art course. Afterwards he continued external examining and teaching courses.

Despite this extremely active and busy career Gluck always found time to paint. Any day when was unable to do so was, he thought, a day wasted. The themes to which he kept returning were landscape (predominantly Italian) as well as still life and interiors — his work is often surprisingly domestic.

Whenever possible he worked in front of his subject since he thought that to do so best conveyed what he felt about it . He quoted Braque: “It isn’t enough to make people see what you paint. You must also make them touch it.”

A regular contributor to exhibitions, his pictures can be found in Leeds City Art Gallery, the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, the Palace of Westminster, the Department of Transport, the University of Wolverhampton and the Arnimallee in Berlin.

Gluck was also a member of the London Group, the New English Art Club, the Society of Landscape Painters, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, and — for watercolour came to be his favourite medium — the Royal Watercolour Society (serving as vice-president from 1999 to 2002).

In his professional and in his private life alike Gluck was open, honest and direct. These were also the qualities he brought to his work.

In 1963 he married the artist Sally Hallam whom he had first met at Leeds College of Art. She died in 2006.

David Gluck, artist and teacher was born on October 29, 1939. He died of cancer on February 17, 2007, aged 67