Philip Jones was one of the most distinguished and individual British painters of the generation born in the 1930s, younger than the Neo-Romantics who came to the fore in the war years and senior to the second wave of St Ives abstractionists who achieved fame in the 1950s.

Jones occupied a very English middle ground, somewhere between Romantic landscape and free-form abstraction. He was not better known because, after some initial success, he withdrew completely from the London art scene for some 15 years, between the ages of 40 and 55. He was content, apparently, to cultivate his (very extensive) garden in Norfolk and let the rest of the art world go by.

Working on his beautiful, if dilapidated, 18th-century house, Clermont Hall, and its neglected garden, he exhibited rarely, and only locally, at a time when convention would suggest he should have been consolidating his artistic reputation in the metropolis.

He never ceased from painting, though the gargantuan task of bringing the house — originally built in the 1770s as a shooting box and elegantly elaborated by William Pilkington in 1812 — back to gorgeous life occupied much of his time and energies, especially since he was his own decorator and head gardener, not to mention the father of four children.

Given all that, his neglect of the art market meant that the art market disgracefully neglected him. He denied any noticeable artistic influence from either side of his family: his mother was a descendant of Samuel Pepys, and his father came from a long line of rural vicars and lawyers. Fortunately, his father harboured no unrealistic hopes that young Philip might follow him into his London solicitor’s practice, thinking he was too indiscreet to be a lawyer, and had better do what he had wanted to do since early childhood: be a full-time painter.

Having failed to get into his father’s school, Winchester, he went instead to Malvern, where he was taught by the eccentric Post-Impressionist painter Harry Fabian Ware, and won both the art prizes.

From Malvern he went into National Service, commanding a troop of armoured cars in Malaya and painting in watercolours during what little spare time he had. Back in England, he entered the Slade, and recorded being bowled over, in his relative innocence, by seeing on his first day the drawings by Wyndham Lewis, Augustus John and William Orpen hanging in the corridor, reflecting that all this originality of vision dated back some 50 years and came from artists as young as he was.

After that he found two years of drawing from plaster casts, as the Slade then required, rather dispiriting, but at least the one-to-one tutors in the school included William Coldstream, Thomas Monnington, William Townsend and Claude Rogers, while the occasional visitors/advisers, more enliveningly, included John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Lucian Freud, who bought one of Jones’s student works. Jones’s tendencies, even at this time, were away from the sobriety and drab colours of the so-called Euston Road painters such as Coldstream and Townsend, in favour of hotter colours and closer approaches to abstraction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his graduating grade was distinctly unimpressive, and for the next few years he threw himself on the mercy of the Arts Council, which proved considerably more accommodating, and permitted him to follow his own bent in painting.

During the 1950s he made several appearances in mixed exhibitions with titles such as Artists of Fame and Promise and Young Contemporaries. His first one-man show was in Stockholm in 1965, and he had to wait, or rather chose to wait, for his first London solo exhibition until 1986. He was one of those artists who find their own voice very early on, and then continue in clear progression to modify and develop it through the years.

His paintings of the 1960s, before his long withdrawal, are immediately recognisable as his work. They are all clearly landscape-based, with a rich subtlety of colour, but the precise landscape concerned is generally abstracted, so that while one might be sure that there are hills in the background, one is left to guess (should one care to) whether the shapes in the foreground are mountain cattle, stone outcrops, or just shapes, there for reasons of dynamic composition.

During his withdrawal his painting tended to reflect more clearly the subdued, dark intensity of his immediate surroundings in Norfolk, but then recently he took to travelling more widely, simplifying his style and moving to a more brilliant palette, evoking the bright Mediterranean sunlight of Greece and, even more strikingly, the tropical colours of The Gambia, where he travelled to paint at least six times.

His zest for the visual continued to the end of his life, and not just the obviously visual: as he observed himself: “My message is that of what I see beneath the surface, whether in front of, below or above the visual plane . . . I reflect on the wonders of what we have been given and the landscape both urban and rural at which Turner marvelled in paint and Wordsworth in print.”

He is survived by his wife, Frances, and their four children, all of whom have in various ways been involved with art and design.

Philip Jones, painter, was born on April 1, 1933. He died on December 31, 2008, aged 75

www.philip-jones.co.uk