ENAMELLING, the art of fusing vitreous glazes on to metalic or other surfaces, has been practised for 2,500 years, on Celtic shields and Renaissance altarpieces. It was used by Cellini and Lalique, and finds everyday application in bathrooms and kitchens. The art was further advanced by Patrick Furse, who worked to find adventurous new combinations of metal and glass oxides.

In 1959 Furse took on the enamelling department at Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, which flourished during his 24-year tenure. He taught only part time, but made a great impact on the students. He was especially interested in the chemistry that would produce deep, intense, yet not glaring colours.

He created or collaborated on several large enamelled works of art. These included abstract panels of his own creation, as well as the installations by Stefan Knapp in Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport, and Sidney Nolan’s huge Eureka Stockade mural for the Reserve Bank of Australia in Melbourne.

Furse was particularly drawn to the experimental, the avant-garde and the ecological. He studied Eastern philosophies, Hokusai, Noh theatre and the works of early video artists and radical Green thinkers.

Patrick John Dolignon Furse was born in London, the son of Sir Ralph Furse, who worked as a private secretary to Churchill and head of recruitment for the Colonial Service. A scholarship took him to Eton, where his painting and etching were encouraged by Robin Darwin. He then went up to Balliol to read classics, but the bohemian streak got the better of him and he threw his books out of the college window and set off to London to become an artist. He quickly found a place at the Byam Shaw School of Art.

Meanwhile, his sister, Jill, was becoming known in the West End as an actress, and through her he had the chance to make backstage drawings at the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells, where Margot Fonteyn, an early love, was appearing.

When the Second World War broke out Furse, who had represented his school at shooting, joined the Rifle Brigade. Furse’s war work was in air reconnaissance and liaison between Army and RAF, and with the Polish Air Force.

Demobilised in the rank of major after being mentioned in dispatches, he scraped a living in the postwar film industry as a storyboard artist, and in 1946 he became the third husband of Elisabeth Haden-Guest, who also worked at Ealing Studios. As a communist in Berlin she had helped several people to escape the Nazis, and during the war she worked in France on the “Pat Line”, the first and most significant of the escape organisations.

Together the Furses opened a shop near Sloane Square selling prints and antiques, but when business proved slow they turned it into a small restaurant and club called the Bistro. Furse continued to paint, sculpt and deal in pictures; his ballet drawings were shown at the Wildenstein Gallery and later he worked as darkroom assistant to the fashion photographer Claude Virgin. He turned his attention to enamelling in the late 1950s.

Individual artistic projects included the world’s largest display of enamel panelling at Alexander’s department store in New Jersey, and Sidney Nolan’s 1965 design for the 65ft Eureka Stockade memorial in Melbourne. To commemorate the crushing of the uprising on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854, Nolan decorated 66 copper panels. Then Furse and his fellow enameller Robin Banks helped Nolan to cover the panels with jewellery enamel before firing. From Banks ’s studio in Fulham, the panels were shipped to the Reserve Bank of Australia. Nolan was especially pleased with a hue achieved by Furse’s innovative use of nitric acid and flux in the enamelling.

After retiring from the Central School in 1983, Furse became reclusive, though he continued to find new fields of study, such as Arabic calligraphy and learning Chinese. He also continued to paint.

He is survived by his second wife, Antonia, whom he married in 1969, and by the son and three daughters of his first marriage.

Patrick Furse, artist, was born on December 8, 1918. He died on July 7, 2005, aged 86.