ONE of the Lake District's best loved landscape painters, Jill Aldersley, was laid to rest in Ambleside churchyard this week, after a packed funeral at St Mary's Parish Church attended by more than 600 friends, fellow artists and climbing companions.

Jill was born in London in 1943 of Yorkshire ancestry, but her parents, George and Madge Aldersley, soon returned north, to live in a millstone grit farmhouse high up on Holme Moss.

It was here that Jill's love of art and mountain scenery was born, greatly influenced by her father who was a water board engineer, but spent all his free time woodcarving and sculpting.

An only child, Jill spent many happy holidays at Rosthwaite and Wastwater with her rock-climbing parents, and having moved to Longridge, near Preston, Jill went on from grammar school to the Harris College of Further Education, and then trained as an art teacher in oils at the Manchester College of Art and Design.

Her ambition was always to live in the Lakes with her parents, and after two years teaching art in Aspatria, she moved to Ambleside in 1967 to develop her career as a watercolour painter, while working part time for George Cook, at Ambleside Studio Pottery, at the Old Mill.

Her parents soon joined her and at one time all three worked at the pottery. Jill's permanent home became a tiny cottage off North Road, in Ambleside.

Her commitment to local art began as an exhibitor with the Lake Artists Society in 1967, to which she was elected in 1979. Jill was also a long-standing member of Kendal Art Society, of which she was made President in 2005, and she helped found Ambleside and District Art Society in 1974. She loved to paint out on the fells, or in old barns and byres in the company of fellow artists, describing her use of watercolour as "revelling in its translucency and its capacity to convey the subtleties of mood in this ever-changing landscape."

Jill's twin love of fell and rock fitted neatly alongside her art and she regularly combined them all to paint in high places, especially her beloved Skye, Rhum and Eigg, and sometimes higher still, in the Alps, Nepal and the Himalayas, where she once managed a painting at 19,000 feet.

Having learned to climb with Preston Mountaineering Club, she joined the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the Lake District and climbed to VS in the 1970s, enjoying the camaraderie of meets and climbing trips. She became only the second woman to be elected FRCC president, a position she held twice. Jill also played a major role in preparing the FRCC's Centenary exhibition this year, but the diagnosis of a brain tumour in May prevented her from attending the celebrations. Many FRCC friends were among those who flocked to see her at Holehird, where she was cared for during the last few months of her life and where she died.

Jill cared deeply about Ambleside and the civic trust. Jill was prepared to pick up litter, clean road signs, plant daffodils in neglected corners or dash off a sketch or two to illustrate the Newsletter. To scores of evening class students, she was the gentle tutor whose constructive criticism encouraged the faint-hearted; and to fellow art society members, Jill was someone who always gave unstintingly of her time and skills to help those less able.

Her work was widely familiar to the public through Lakeland greetings cards as well as her witty Lakeland Santa Christmas cards. She exhibited extensively in galleries and exhibitions throughout the area, sometimes jointly with her mother, who painted as F. Marie Destelle, and who died two years ago aged 95.