‘She went to her studio every day and no one was allowed near it’: the glorious nature paintings of Yasmin David

When Clio David was growing up, her mother’s studio was off-limits. The wooden outbuilding where her mother, Yasmin, went to paint was in the apple orchards that surrounded her childhood home in south Devon. It had once been a dormitory for the students of Dartington Hall, a progressive school where Clio’s father taught during the 1960s.

“It was somewhere she went every day to paint and work, and no one was allowed near it,” says Clio. “The walls of our house were covered in her paintings, but the studio was a private place.”

Yasmin’s own family had celebrated and nurtured creativity. Her mother, Lorna, was one of the Garman siblings, a free-spirited family whose friendships and love affairs connected everyone from Peggy Guggenheim to Vita Sackville-West. Lorna married Ernest Wishart, a wealthy communist who co-founded socialist publishing house Lawrence & Wishart, but she was also Lucian Freud’s lover and the subject of a number of his paintings before the painter met and married Lorna’s niece, Kitty. When she was 19, Yasmin discovered that her biological father was writer Laurie Lee. He dedicated his 1944 book of poetry, The Sun My Monument, to her mother and to “Y”. Yasmin found out that her name was chosen because a capital letter Y resembles two conjoined Ls – to symbolise Laurie and Lorna’s relationship.

But Yasmin quit London and art school at 23, moving to rural Devon with her husband Julian David, who became a Jungian analyst. She lived on Luscombe farm for much of the rest of her life, and the full extent of her painting talent was only discovered after her death. Clio was going through her mother’s possessions, and opened a cupboard to find more than 200 canvases and 550 works on paper neatly stacked inside – luminous, brooding pictures of the area’s moorland, woods and rivers, with the wild landscape lit by spectral sunlight. There was also a wealth of poetry, nature writing and touching letters from Yasmin’s father.

A selection of these pieces were shown alongside the paintings in a memorial show at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2021. The gallery had been built by Lorna’s sister, Kathleen Garman, to showcase work by her husband, sculptor Jacob Epstein.

This month, Yasmin’s work is in a new solo show that focuses on her contribution to British landscape painting. The Nature of Light, featuring more than 40 works on canvas alongside drawings, sketches, notebooks and photographs, is at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, about 40 miles from Yasmin’s home in Luscombe.

Curator Gemma Girvan says: “Presenting Yasmin’s works here brings them full circle, reconnecting them to the place which inspired them. Yasmin lived and worked on the edge of Dartmoor and many of the landscapes she painted will be instantly recognisable to our local audiences. We hope this exhibition will encourage wider debate about the many talented female artists whose work remains under-recognised including our gallery’s namesake, Thelma Hulbert.”

Art historian Sophie Hatchwell, who is giving a talk on Yasmin’s work during the run of the show, says that it “sits in comparison with that of Joan Eardley, Barbara Delaney and Gillian Ayres. It offers a way into thinking about the British landscape outside the traditional patriarchal framework as a territory to be conquered.”

The British art world, confronting its long history of institutional bias and sexism, is now reconsidering the importance of female art inspired by nature. The Courtauld gallery in London ran the exhibition A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists this spring, and artists as disparate as Cuban sculptor Ana Mendieta and British printmaker Angie Lewin have major shows either on or scheduled.

Clio David, a documentary film-maker based in London, is now sharing her mother’s work with academics at the Courtauld Institute to ensure Yasmin’s contribution to the landscape genre is recognised. “She was one of the few women working in landscape during the latter part of the 20th century, and I want to place her archive within that period of art history.”

Yasmin’s art is unique, but her background undeniably is, too. And raising the profile of her work would also change the picture of a family where typically women supported the men in their creative endeavours. Clio is all too aware of this: “I want to show her work as her family history is largely dominated by male artists and writers – Laurie Lee, Lucian Freud, Jacob Epstein, Roy Campbell, Michael Wishart. She was a female artist from a very well-connected family, but working outside the art establishment on a farm in the middle of the countryside, about as far from the Colony Rooms as you could get. I want her work as an artist to be recognised and celebrated.”

• Yasmin David: The Nature of Light is at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton, until 31 October