The artist Roland Collins, who has died aged 97, was a fine painter of places in the realistic tradition of the English watercolourists. For years he worked away in relative obscurity, though his pictures were shown in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and at art fairs, but then in 2012 came his apotheosis: a major exhibition at Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent, which turned out to be a huge popular and commercial success. A substantial publication introduced his work to a wider audience, and a show in Mayfair followed. So it was that in his 90s Collins was finally given a taste of the recognition he had long deserved.
By temperament modest and even self-deprecating, Collins enjoyed his new-found acclaim, but he did not allow it to turn his head. Life continued much as usual, with an annual trip to Dieppe (a longstanding homage to Walter Sickert, one of his enduring enthusiasms), visits to art galleries and buildings of interest (often pubs), and the recording of Britain in paintings of considerable emotional resonance and formal dexterity.
In part he had benefited from the re-emergence of landscape as an acceptable subject for art and the widespread popularity of artists such as Eric Ravilious, John Piper and Edward Bawden, which has has refocused attention on those who have continued to make paintings about buildings and places, irrespective of fashion.
Collins had a real feeling for vernacular architecture, particularly in the city and by the seaside, for canals and the Thames, for fishing boats and sea defences. He loved to paint the unusual or overlooked: costermongers’ barrows, a disused whelk boiler, barrels, fish carts, marine debris, pub signs, street and boat signage. Much of what he depicted has since vanished, so his work is historical record as well as aesthetic statement. His evident delight in wooden fences, gates and odd-shaped buildings was set against the drama of his skies: often full of driving cloud poignantly patterned.
Born in Kensal Rise, north-west London, only child of Frank, a clerk at Marylebone railway station, and Harriet (nee Wiggins), a ladies’ companion, Collins showed artistic aptitude from an early age, winning at the age of eight a poster-colouring competition organised by the Evening News. He attended Kilburn grammar school, helped with scenery painting for the school’s annual Shakespeare play, and was encouraged by the art teacher to go to art school. This he did with the help of a London county council grant, spending two years at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where his teachers included Leon Underwood and Vivian Pitchforth. After college he worked as a studio assistant in an advertising agency, preparing layouts and designs.
In 1937 Collins first exhibited at the Royal Academy, submitting a pen-and-ink drawing entitled Riverside, Chiswick, of two houseboats on the mud at low tide on the Thames. The pen-work was masterly in its taut linearity and rhythmic arrangements of shape, balancing dark and light with satisfying authority. But black and white was not enough for the full expression of his essentially Romantic vision; he needed colour, and gouache (an opaque form of watercolour) became his preferred medium. He painted on paper, usually on sheets measuring about 15in x 21in, which he attached to a drawing board and worked on in front of the chosen subject.
When the second world war broke out Collins registered as a conscientious objector, although a lung problem meant that he could have only undertaken light agricultural work in any case. He continued painting, discovered Fitzrovia in the West End of London (where he was to live for 40 years) and undertook the first of several mural commissions for a Greek restaurant. Artistically versatile, he relished turning his hand to other projects, working as a designer, photographer and even travel writer.
In 1945 he designed the sleeve for the first British LP issued by Decca: Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka. In 1951 he wrote the text for The Flying Poodle, a book for children with photographs by Wolfgang Suschitzky, and in 1956 illustrated another poodle book, the novel Fifi and Antoine by Charlotte Haldane. Meanwhile, in 1954, a series of lithographs, to illustrate Noel Carrington’s book Colour and Pattern in the Home, seemed to anticipate in their crisp design some of the 1960s pop-inflected interiors of the English painter and printmaker Patrick Caulfield.
An individual of considerable style, with a clipped moustache and dapper clothes, Collins rode every day for 29 years along the Rotten Row track in Hyde Park, stabling his horse nearby. Every year he designed his own screen-printed Christmas cards (often featuring poodles), and usually printed them himself.
He met his future wife, Connie Ross, a poodle breeder, in 1963, though they did not marry until 1987. In 1964 they bought a weekend retreat on the Kent coast at Whitstable – the cottage in which the art critic Brian Sewell had passed much of his childhood – and despite five years’ exile in Cornwall in the 1990s, Whitstable, as well as London, provided an endless source of inspiration for Collins’s brush.
I saw him recently; he stood for well over an hour showing me dozens of unframed paintings in a portfolio, recalling where they had been painted and often telling some amusing anecdote about them. He was his usual charming and courteous self, and though already ill, his memory for detail was unimpaired. A painter of considerable distinction, he was also a rare spirit.
Connie survives him.
• Roland Arthur Frank Collins, artist, born 17 September 1918; died 27 September 2015
