Sir Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, Bt, artist celebrated for his depictions of light and space – obituary

Sir Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, 6th Bt, who has died following a heart attack aged 74, was an artist who painted light and space in atmospheric interiors and in landscapes with exceptional sensitivity that won him an eager following among collectors.

In the words of his elder son Patrick, his painting was “essentially a solitary pursuit driven as much by a kind of philosophical inquiry as it was by craftsmanship and the creation of beautiful objects … for all his archaic sensibilities, he painted with a modern, conceptual mind. He did not paint historical subjects out of reverence but because they were accessible to him.”

Painting took precedence over domestic convenience or comfort, and groups of food and flowers were kept in the rooms at the same time so that “it was common for us all to be cramped around one corner of the kitchen table to accommodate Dad’s still lives.” Fish was a favourite component in these, often rotting as part of the motif, or occupying the fridge between outings.

Born on May 4 1945, Edmund Fairfax-Lucy (known as Ed) grew up in a converted mill at Fossebridge in Gloucestershire. His father Brian, who became the 5th baronet in 1965, was a career soldier who became a writer after marrying Alice Buchan, the daughter of John Buchan, herself a writer.

With his sister Emma, Fairfax-Lucy shared a love of nature and poetry intensified by isolation. He began drawing and was encouraged to paint at Eton before spending a year in Florence learning Italian, working in a printmaker’s studio and immersing himself in the works of Lorenzetti, Masaccio and Mantegna.

He returned to study printmaking at City and Guilds Art School in Kennington before going on to the Royal Academy Schools to study Fine Art; there his painting methods and outlook aligned closely with those of the Keeper, Peter Greenham.

The painters Allan Gwynne-Jones and his wife Rosemary Allen, with their daughter Emily, also a painter, were neighbours and family friends at Eastleach in Gloucestershire and became his mentors. Lifelong friendships were formed with fellow students, including Alan Dodd, John Morley, Richard Sorrell and Matthew Wright.

Elected to the New English Art Club at 25, Fairfax-Lucy had his first exhibition with the New Grafton Gallery in 1971 and exhibited regularly with them until his last show in 2005, which he shared with Mary Fedden. His work was hung at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for an unbroken 45-year period.

In the 1970s, while living in a cottage in Suffolk, he laid a brick floor, taking hints from Dutch paintings, and this prompted an early painting of an interior, Mop and Bucket, with a view from one room to another.

He explained that his interior paintings were not about “form as revealed by light so much as the light itself, filtered through windows”. He carried the works of the earlier masters in his head as references, Gauguin, Bonnard and Picasso included, especially their use of colour.

At the end of the war his father and uncle had completed the gift to the National Trust of the Lucys’ Elizabethan Charlecote House near Stratford-upon-Avon, but the family rooms were left under dust sheets, as they had been for several decades. During the 1970s, Fairfax-Lucy visited often and brought the house back to life, sharing the discoveries he and visiting friends (including the singer Ian Dury) dressed up in Georgian clothes that were still hanging in the wardrobes.

He worked in a harmonious partnership with Jeffrey Haworth, the National Trust’s Historic Building Representative, to research the collections and reinstate the rooms.

In 1991, having spent time working for the National Trust Foundation for Art, he had a show of paintings of interiors at Mompesson House, Salisbury. This was the occasion for an article on his work in Country Life by Paddy Kitchen, who wrote: “He paints slowly, and there is no definite moment when he judges a picture finished. Not only is there the dense relationship between the canvas and the subject in front of it to be gradually unravelled … It is no exaggeration to say that Edmund Fairfax-Lucy is in thrall to light.”

Off painting duty, he was passionate about conversation, and confessed to having what he called “a low riot threshold” so far as fireworks and Scottish reels were concerned.

Given a second life, Fairfax-Lucy would have liked to have been a builder. He enjoyed practical projects as a release of the pent-up energy generated while painting.

At Charlecote he encouraged the restoration of an 18th-century water mill on the estate to working condition. With his knowledge of Renaissance proportional systems, he recognised how they had regulated the forecourt garden, and replanted it with box and yew hedges to amplify the effect.

In the old Slaughter Ground he embarked on an ambitious water garden, reputedly the largest earthwork in Europe made by one person, and filled it with old roses; it is still unfinished.

The three-sided moat was fed from the River Avon by an experimental ram pump. He went to Zimbabwe with researchers from Warwick University to help install several more of them.

But Charlecote, despite its park, was too close to civilisation, and Fairfax-Lucy sought places where he could recapture the remoteness of childhood, finding them in Ireland and latterly in the Scottish borders, where he took over another mill, a Buchan inheritance, and created a studio and home he could call his own.

Without any desire to play the squire at Charlecote, he took on local responsibilities as churchwarden and President of the Warwickshire Gardens Trust and the Mid Warwickshire Association of the National Trust.

In 1987 he joined the Art Workers’ Guild, the London-based gathering of practitioners in the visual arts, making new friends and undertaking the year-long role of Master in 2011. Each meeting began with an extract of poetry suitable to the time of year.

In a retrospect of his year, he wrote: “My intention, in planning lectures, was to celebrate those things which it is impossible to improve upon, even if that were to seem old-fashioned.

“Tapestry is of that essence, being a great form of figurative representation, now virtually lost … Painting in the Renaissance; the gift of an art of such depth that no formula can be discerned by analysis or with the aid of a magnifying glass.”

Edmund Fairfax-Lucy was married three times; first, in 1974, to Sylvia Ogden, and briefly in 1986 to the photographer and writer Lucinda Lambton. In 1994 he married Erica Loane, who survives him with their two sons.

Sir Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, 6th Bt, born May 4 1945, died March 30 2020