HEATON Cooper Studio is staging a display of paintings, drawings and etchings by the late, highly regarded artist, Jean Sturgis.

Running at the Grasmere studio's archive gallery until the end of June, A Sense of Place: Paintings, Prints and Drawings exhibition brings together work that spans Jean's whole career, revealing an artist of great sensitivity with a distinct and expressive vision.

Born Jean Nicoll, in 1931 just outside Kendal, she was the daughter of JS Nicoll, a director of K Shoes, who encouraged her early enthusiasm for art.

Among his friends were the artists Robin Wallace and William Wilson, and Jean, as a girl, was able work with them, since her father invited them to the family home at Staveley to lead painting courses for local children.

She studied art first at Goldsmiths College, London and then at the Slade School of Art: "It was a stimulating and challenging time," said her artist son Daniel Sturgis. "Among her painting tutors were William Coldstream, founder of the Euston Road Group, Patrick George, Maurice Field and LS Lowry. She learnt etching and printmaking from the brilliant printmaker John Buckland-Wright. The emphasis of the teaching was always towards careful observation and working directly from the motif."

In 1953, Jean was awarded a prestigious travelling scholarship that allowed her to work at the British School at Rome. Her 18 months in Italy - first in Rome, then in the little hilltop town of Anticoli Corrado - instilled in her a lifelong love of the country, its art and its people.

Returning to England she settled in London, exhibiting in various shows in Edinburgh and London, including the Leicester Galleries, one the most prominent forums for post-war British painting. She also taught at Queen’s Gate School, and in hospitals for the mentally ill.

In 1958 she married the architect Tim Sturgis and together they had five children. “Her dedication to family life altered the trajectory of her artistic career, but she continued to paint, and to engage with the arts in other ways,” added Daniel.

Jean was the chief examiner for O level art for the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, and taught art at the Westminster Under School. She also contributed acclaimed plant drawings and watercolours to several gardening books for authors, including Rosemary Verey, Penelope Hobhouse and Esme Clarke. She contributed watercolour garden plans for books on Levens Hall, and Hatfield House, as well as for Hugh Cavendish's A Time to Plant - Life and Gardening at Holker.

She returned to exhibiting in the 1990s, with a series of solo shows in London - first at the Clarendon Gallery, and then at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. In 2009 she was selected by Mary Burkett as one of five artists in a group exhibition at the Red Barn Gallery, in Melkinthorpe, near Penrith.

Settling in Kentmere where she developed a beautiful garden, Jean continued both to paint and to etch. Her later works retain all their sense of engagement and particularity. She said that landscape; buildings in their setting, whether urban or rural; and trees and flowers in their surroundings, had always been the stimuli for her work.

The Grasmere exhibition, created by son Daniel with artist Julian Cooper, runs in the Heaton Cooper archive gallery until the end of June. Studio director Becky Heaton Cooper said the exhibition will be a fascinating insight to the life and work of a very talented artist whose work deserved wider recognition.