Edgar Holloway was a key figure of the Etching Revival of the 1920s and 1930s, an extraordinary period in the history of British printmaking. His etchings and drawings provide a visual autobiography of his long career, his family and friends and his travels around Britain, Europe and the US.

He is best remembered for his striking series of self-portraits. With the conviction of Rembrandt, the first visual diarist to record his life through the medium of etching, Holloway made more etched self-portraits over a sustained period of time than any other British artist: 33 between 1931 and 2002.

Born in Doncaster in 1914, Holloway was a child prodigy with scant formal tuition in art. His father, a Yorkshire miner-turned-print-seller, recognised his talents and, through art, foresaw a better way of life for his son.

With letters of introduction to Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of the Print Room at the British Museum, and to the artist Muirhead Bone, the family moved to London in June 1931. Winning the approval of both Dodgson and Bone, young Edgar attracted the attention of many who were in a position to create opportunities for young artists: Martin Hardie at the Victora and Albert Museum; the print historian Malcolm Salaman; and the artists James McBey, who bought Holloway’s prints, Ernest Lumsden, who invited him to join the Society of Artist Printers, Joseph Webb, in whose Harrow studio he would exchange views on art and techniques, and William Wilson, the travel companion with whom he shared a cottage in Essex.

By the age of 20 Holloway had staged two solo exhibitions in London, his work had been purchased by the British Museum and the V&A, among other leading collections, and his sitters for portraits included some of London’s literary elite. Holloway was 19 when he drew a portrait of T. S. Eliot seated at his director’s desk at Faber & Faber. He etched the likenesses of the poet and critic Stephen Spender, a regular visitor to the Faber offices, and the author and critic Herbert Read, drawn at his home in Hampstead.

Through continuous study and self-analysis, Holloway made a series of sensitive and revealing self-portraits that were meant to reflect his inner self through the manipulation of outward appearance. Scrutinising himself in a mirror, he adopted various costumes, gestures and expressions to suggest aspects of his personality.

Alongside portraiture he was equally committed to landscape. When he moved to London he saw first-hand the diversity of prints by young etchers, among them Graham Sutherland and Paul Drury, who, inspired by Samuel Palmer’s early drawings and late etchings, created scenes of an agrarian landscape that was fast disappearing.

He explored rural Middlesex and Essex in search of similar subjects. In Eastcote (1932), Brookside (1932), Latton Priory (1936) and Bosses Farm (1936), he captured what was then threatened by suburbanisation and has now disappeared or changed beyond recognition.

Holloway enjoyed success and critical acclaim early in his career, though he arrived too late to benefit from the opportunities of the “etching boom” — public taste had changed and the market for prints had collapsed during the Depression of the 1930s. Exempted from military service owing to periodic outbursts of psoriasis, he took up schoolteaching posts in London where at weekends he drew the blitzed city. In need of respite, he visited Capel-y-ffin on the Welsh borders where Eric Gill had lived and worked in the 1920s. On arrival, he was welcomed by one of Gill’s favourite models, Daisy Monica Hawkins. Six weeks later, in July 1943, they were married.

Holloway continued to make occasional prints until 1947. While his turning to lettering and cartography had been prompted by the need to provide for his young family, it was also ideological. He had been introduced to Gill’s writings and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1941. Reading Gill’s books led him to doubt the value of his work as a fine artist. In 1948 he accepted an invitation from Philip Hagreen to join the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a community of Catholic artists, founded on Ditchling Common, East Sussex, by Gill in 1918.

For the next 20 years, Holloway was a graphic designer, undertaking commissions for leading publishers. In 1957, not foreseeing that he would ever again take up etching, he sold more than 150 of his early copper plates to a scrap-metal merchant.

In 1969, however, he returned to painting and print-making, his interest in etching undiminished. Daisy Monica, whom he nursed through a long illness, died in September 1979. That year Garton & Co mounted an exhibition of his work in London. It was the first of many national retrospectives that toured Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, and the beginning of the rehabilitation of Holloway’s work. In turn, the revived interest in his early etching fuelled his desire to make new prints.

In May 1984 Holloway was married to the artist Jennifer Boxall (née Squire), and they set up home and studio in Woodbarton, the first guild house, designed by Gill. Holloway remained a member of the guild and was its last chairman. In 1991, almost 60 years after his first unsuccessful application, at 18, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. A Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings and Engravings by Edgar Holloway was published by Scolar Press in 1996.

While remaining outside mainstream concerns in contemporary art, as a result of which his reputation fluctuated, Holloway was once more in demand later in life, rising on the tide of growing interest in printmaking of the interwar years. He was the last surviving artist of a generation that flourished during a unique period in the history of British printmaking. A link to the past, his portraits and anecdotes of a close circle of friends and contemporaries — artists, writers, curators — are an important historical record of 20th-century British culture.

Holloway’s wife, Jennifer, and three sons and the daughter of his first marriage survive him.

Edgar Holloway, painter-etcher, was born on May 6, 1914. He died on November 9, 2008, aged 94