Kyffin Williams became a painter shortly after he was diagnosed with epilepsy and his doctor suggested he try a “harmless” profession. So began a career that has spanned seven decades and outlasted numerous fashions in art.

When the auctioneers Sotheby’s held a sale of Welsh art in 2001, Kyffin Williams was the most prominently featured name. It was recognition of his status as the grand old man of a painting community that is not short of talented and commercially successful members.

Williams was born into a family of gentleman farmers living in reduced circumstances on Anglesey. He attended Shrewsbury School, a common destination for sons of the well-to-do Welsh, but his parents could not afford the £200 he needed to become an army officer.

Instead he served in the ranks of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers from 1936 to1941 before the epilepsy ended his military career. He began studying art at the Slade College in London but says he was not truly inspired until seeing the work of the Italian renaissance artist Pierro Della Francesca.

His first one-man exhibition was held in 1949, by which time he was art master at Highgate School, where he remained until retiring in the early 1970’s.

Many of his most successful paintings possess dark quality no better displayed than in his renderings of stormy seas or rain-lashed hillsides. The artist suggests it could be the result of “suppressed anger” as a result of his medical condition.

It is this quality perhaps that makes his landscapes so distinctively Welsh. In his portraits, people often appear as rough-hewn as the land that produced them.

It is a rare gallery or major public building in Wales that does not boast at least one work by Sir Kyffin Williams. He is the nearest thing to a National Artist.