LINES of Ascent features the work eminent painter William Heaton Cooper produced for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club guides for 50 years from 1930s onwards.

The exhibition, which runs until the end of April at Grasmere's Heaton Cooper Studio, has been pulling in enthusiastic visitors from both the art and climbing worlds.

Becky Heaton Cooper, director and general manager of the business established by the landscape painter Alfred Heaton Cooper in 1905, said they were thrilled by the response to the show.

She added: “It is clearly one of the most successful exhibitions we have ever staged, and clearly highlights the place of the Lake District as one of Britain’s cultural capitals.”

Alfred Heaton Cooper's son William built the present gallery in Grasmere in 1938, and for generations their paintings and books have influenced the way the landscape of the Lake District has been viewed.

Lines of Ascent was opened by veteran climber Al Phizacklea who took on the task of illustrating the guidebooks after William Heaton Cooper. He described his own work as “technical, with none of WHC’s artistry.”

The books were regarded as bibles for the climbing community, showing new routes as they developed, drawn on site and working closely with the climbers at the crag face.

One of Britain’s pioneer female mountaineers, Gwen Moffat, now 90, hailed Heaton Cooper’s influence as a climber and guidebook illustrator: “He was a man who knew his mountains; in his illustrations the routes are lines running up pencil-shaded rock where every crack and overhang, every buttress is correct and matched neatly to the text.”

Alongside the drawings, guides and journals are climbing photographs from the 1930s and 1940s from Heaton Cooper’s private album, as well as some of his paintings that reference the mid-20th Century climbing scene, including some never exhibited before.

There is also an Alpine sketch-book of drawings and sketches of the Grandes Jorasses from above the original Couvercle Hut, and crowded interiors of the old hut in the 1950s.

However, high altitude paintings don't come much better and dramatic than those by Julian Cooper, son of William Heaton Cooper and the sculptor Ophelia Gordon Bell.

An internationally known painter and a member of the Alpine Club who has climbed throughout Britain and the Alps, Julian's huge oil painting of the Eiger North Face is one of the most striking works in the Grasmere show.