Sir Kyffin Williams

He was an unassuming man, only too happy for an oil he was painting to be inadvertently improved by its toppling, face down, on to his new tweed hat, or for the texture of a watercolour, being tackled al fresco on the windy shore of Llanddwyn, to be helped along by the addition of wind-blown sand.

Williams had a way with words as well. His autobiography, Across the Straits (1973), immortalises in print his skills as a raconteur as he decries his own tennis ability (his forehand drive “was practically unreturnable and certainly if it was returned I was so surprised that I lost the point”) or is astonished by the high-handedness of a certain Lord Davies, who decided when everyone in Llandinam should be in bed by turning the master switch that plunged the village into darkness “at an annoyingly early hour”.

Born the younger son of a bank manager in Llangefni, Anglesey, and descended from a long line of Welsh clergymen, John Kyffin Williams left Shrewsbury School in 1935, with an art prize under his arm. He was articled to a firm of land agents in Pwllheli, enthusiastically pursuing country sports in his spare time, and also joining the 6th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, Territorial Army, at the suggestion of a friend who shared his passion for shooting and considered rightly that this might be an opportunity for more of it.

Between signing his military papers and receiving his commission, Williams experienced his first attack of epilepsy, an affliction the Army was to tolerate for five years — enjoyable ones for Williams — until he was invalided out, much against his will, in 1941, still in his early twenties.

A doctor proposed that he take up art, and Williams did just that, later blessing his epilepsy for having steered him in this direction. Professor Randolph Schwabe, who interviewed him for the Slade, was, said the ever-self-depreciating Williams, “surprised at my inability and obvious lack of talent but in his kindly way suggested that I should enter for a term to see how things went”.

However, the former soldier not only did well enough to last the full three-year course, but also managed to secure both the Slade Portrait Prize and the Robert Ross Leaving Scholarship.

Crucially, the teaching of drawing was one of the Slade’s great strengths, and as Williams wrote in his 2001 book, Drawings: “Paintings are often laboured things, and when worked upon over a period of time they tend to lose the initial excitement of conception. Drawings are usually fresh; they tell us much about the artist who created them.”

In later life he mourned the disappearance of draughtsmanship from the curriculums of art colleges. “It has been absolutely criminal the way they have not been teaching drawing,” he complained in his eighties.

In 1944 he started teaching art at Highgate School, London, a post he held until retiring to Wales, aged 55, in 1973. In the long school holidays he escaped to Wales to paint and draw.

“I have been lucky to have been born into such a land and . . . to have been given a life that has been long enough for me to put down my appreciation of it,” he wrote.

And if a violent desire to paint (maybe caused or at least exaggerated by his epilepsy) overcame him in term time, when he should have been teaching, two of his pupils — Anthony Green and Patrick Procktor — still coped well enough to become Royal Academicians themselves.

Williams’s first one-man exhibition was at Colnaghi in London in 1948. He also showed at the Leicester Galleries, the Thackeray Gallery and the Royal Academy, at the Glynn Vivian Museum & Art Gallery, Swansea, the Albany Gallery and Howard Roberts Gallery, both in Cardiff, the Tegfryn Gallery, Menai Bridge, and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. He had his first retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Wales in 1987.

And at Oriel Ynys Môn, in his native Llangefni, there were retrospectives of portraits (1993), landscapes (1995) and drawings (1998). Of these, the portraits show proved the most popular and indeed he always considered his portraits his most important works.

In 1968 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to record the Welsh in Patagonia, where he stayed for six months, making hundreds of sketches, from many of which he produced oil paintings on his return.

He was president of Wales’s fine arts institution, the Royal Cambrian Academy, 1969-76, and again from 1992 to the present. He also became a vice-president of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, founded in 1751 for the encouragement of literature, science and the arts. He was a Deputy-Lieutenant for Gwynedd in 1986, and among other laurels became an honorary fellow of University College, Swansea, University College, Bangor, and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1970, becoming a Royal Academician four years later.

A generous supporter of his local community, he gave drawing lessons in Gwynedd primary schools; judged, and donated the main prize for a Welsh national drawing competition; and served as patron of the Bardsey Island Trust, whose protection of that island’s wildlife and ecosystem was a cause close to his heart. And he regularly donated drawings and prints to be auctioned for local causes. He gave 350 drawings, and some oil paintings, to the Anglesey museum and art gallery, Oriel Ynys Môn, which is raising funds to build a permanent home (to be known as the Kyffin Williams Gallery) for this collection.

Having selected art for the National Eisteddfod of Wales several times between 1955 and 1989, in later years Williams became exasperated with some of the works receiving awards there (as indeed he did with winners of the Turner Prize). In 2005, when the Eisteddfod’s fine-art medal was won by a video installation showing people in combat fatigues burning a garden shed, he was not alone in thinking it was “like awarding the championship in the Welsh Black cattle class to a sheep”.

If anything, his new “grumpy old man” image boosted his popularity beyond his already very wide circle of friends. He had been knighted in 2000, but in 2006 there was a tribute of another kind from James Dean Bradfield, frontman of the Welsh rock band, the Manic Street Preachers. A track called Which Way To Kyffin? featured on Bradfield’s debut album as a solo artist, and was explained thus by the rock star, 50 years Williams’s junior: “I was in West Wales last year and I had this feeling where I didn’t want to go back to London and was really fighting not to go back. I just felt like driving up to Anglesey to find Kyffin Williams.”

The Government Art Collection, Arts Council of Great Britain, National Museum of Wales, National Portrait Gallery and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, hold examples of Williams’s work.

There is a Welsh saying that every Welsh home must have a harp in the corner and a Kyffin on the wall, and at the Albany Gallery in 2004 people queued for three days and nights for one of his previews, eager to buy particular pictures.

Compulsively interested in Wales, its people, landscape, archaeology, wildlife and country sports, Williams wrote that he learnt most about the mountains from following the Ynysfor Hounds. He loved swapping stories with farmers, and many found their way into his autobiography.

He never married, but was said to have been engaged three times, the obstacle to each match apparently having been his epilepsy, which did not ease until later in his life.

Sir Kyffin Williams, OBE, painter and teacher, was born on May 9, 1918. He died on September 1, 2006, aged 88.