Fred Yates

Reclusive artist whose bold style brought him success late in life

At an age when most people have retired, the painter Fred Yates, who has died aged 85, reached artistic maturity. His work was marked by lush, vibrant colours - thick paint often squeezed straight from the tube - and unmistakable stylised figures with a regular cast of characters: Victorian aunts with hats and coats, mothers with prams, little dogs and children playing obliviously. Many likened him to a "happy Lowry", and his paintings were sought by a growing band of collectors. Later he said that he spent years trying to forget anything he had ever been taught about painting, but this obscured the fact that he was the most sophisticated of naives. His freedom of expression was underpinned by a complete grasp of drawing, colour and composition.

Yates's background was the industrial north of England. Born in Urmston, Manchester, he worked in the family's insurance business before being drafted into the Grenadier Guards at the age of 19. His twin brother was killed during the failed attempt to capture the bridge at Arnhem in September 1944; Fred fought with the allied troops who liberated Brussels.

Once the war ended, he was determined to become an artist, anxious to escape what he described as "the tightness, discipline and torture of my childhood". In 1946 he took a teacher-training course at Bournemouth, specialising in art. Though he was never really cut out to be a teacher, it was not until 1969, after almost two decades teaching in Brighton and Cornwall, that he gave it up to pursue an artistic career, supported by mowing lawns or odd-jobbing at 50p. In Fowey, in Cornwall, he sat out on the harbour, painting the working boats and selling his pictures for £10 each. His style gradually became freer and, from an earthy, close-toned palette, he started to experiment with bolder colour.

Increasingly nomadic, he moved deeper into Cornwall: first, in 1984, to St Just and Cape Cornwall, then Marazion and Lostwithiel in 1995. Most of the time he painted en plein air.

Like his fellow Mancunian, LS Lowry, Yates recorded a fading England: the mills and factories of Manchester, wakes week, working-class holidays at the seaside, Punch and Judy shows on the pier, the dancing girls and the music halls, street parties and the travelling circus, every imaginable escape from the grind of daily routine. His figures were invariably isolated, with no hands and little contact, reflecting his stiff English upbringing.

The sensuousness of his paint betrayed another passion however - the France of Van Gogh, Monet and Cézanne. He took himself off to the Côte d'Azur on painting holidays with the money he was making.

Not that there was any danger of the puritanical Yates being seduced by the good life. He led a spartan lifestyle, entirely driven by his art. He was always up early, readying himself for his day's work, often a full morning and afternoon session on location. If on rare occasions he did not paint for a day or two, he became frustrated and irritable. He always lived alone. He once observed to Cornish primitive Bryan Pearce's mother, Mary, "Bryan never paints figures because he's happy. I paint figures for company."

Commercial success brought its own restrictions. Local galleries wanted the archetypal Yates: busy street scenes or harbours, teeming with figures. Fred however had other ideas. In 1996, in search of his painting heroes and, as he described it, "a tougher landscape", he vanished into rural France: his addresses became hard to keep track of. "Monet and Corot painted here," he wrote. Above all, though, he venerated Van Gogh. He shared the obsessive, driven compulsion to paint, to a point the other side of sanity.

His final resting place, to where he moved in 1998, was as remote as France gets: the mountains of northern Provence and La Drôme. He arrived in a tough winter with temperatures rarely above freezing. At over 80 years of age, it still did not prevent him going out every day to paint in the village, producing one of his most extraordinary, intense series of paintings. He could work incredibly fast, as his skill had become second nature to him and he no longer cared about anyone's approval.

The last time I heard Fred's voice was less than 48 hours before his sudden, fatal heart attack on his way back to England. Generous as ever to his fellow artists, he bemoaned the recent passing of Beryl Cook: "Like Breughel," he observed.

· Frederick Joseph Yates, painter, born July 25 1922; died July 7 2008