THE English painter and printmaker Patrick Caulfield was one of the most admired artists of his generation, though he never achieved general celebrity status. Rare in winning the respect of artists of otherwise radically different persuasions, he transcended the usual boundaries of the art world and remained essentially uncategorisable.

At the risk of oversimplifying his appeal, it might be said that figurative painters admired his sophisticated draughtsmanship and his ability to conjure memorable images, abstract artists his formal control and inventive use of colour, minimalists his austerity and conceptualists his intellectual rigour.

Patrick Joseph Caulfield was born in London in 1936. He grew up mainly in Bolton as part of a working-class family, but after studying in London at the Chelsea School of Art (1956-60) and the Royal College of Art (1960-63) he seemed the perfect example of the urban sophisticate. He admitted late in life to having had elocution lessons in his youth, thinking, probably correctly, that this would improve his chances with the girls.

From the start, the urge to maintain his independence from fashion, which contributed to the enduring quality of his art, was one of Caulfield’s most stubborn resolutions. He was reluctant to be part of any movement, even when his historical importance within it was indisputable.

This was particularly the case with Pop Art. In spite of the persistent efforts to credit him as one of the originators and leading figures of the movement in England — a recognition that most artists would have been happy to accept, whatever paths they took in their later work — he was adamant that the term was inappropriate for his art and that he was in little sympathy with much that was produced under the label. At the time of the Royal Academy’s big survey exhibition of Pop Art in 1991, in which his work featured prominently, he defined Pop Art flippantly as “social realism without the realism”.

The fact remains, however, that he was seen to be aligned as a student with other painters who were at the Royal College in the early 1960s, in particular those who were a year ahead of him, such as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Allen Jones. Some of the last works he produced as a student in 1963, such as Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, after Delacroix, painted in the flat declamatory style of political posters, and Portrait of Juan Gris, a deadpan homage to the Cubist master in a sign-painter’s idiom, are widely regarded as prime examples of early British Pop.

Caulfield preferred to treat outworn Romantic themes rather than applying himself to the signs of contemporary culture, and he subscribed with an almost absurd fidelity to the conventional categories of still life, interior, landscape and figure painting. He cited these things in support of his contention that his work was not only not Pop, but anti-Pop.

Like his more overtly Pop colleagues, however, he delighted in challenging notions of good taste, in his case by embracing kitsch and banal imagery and sometimes outrageously corny subject matter. He had an unusual ability to convey a contemplative mood and a wry sense of humour through a single image, both in his paintings and in the elegantly economical screen prints that brought his work into contact with a much broader audience.

There is a pervasive melancholia running through the paintings of architectural subjects that became the mainstay of Caulfield’s art from the late 1960s, in terms both of their imagery and their use of colour to project a palpable sense of atmosphere, creating a strong emotional current in opposition to the apparent neutrality and calculation of his style of painting.

Many of the pictures convey a sense of desolation, because they represent empty spaces intended for human pleasures and activities — a restaurant after closing time, an office at night, a holiday home with no sign of human habitation — or of exclusion, as in Window at Night of 1969, in which we are offered a tantalising glimpse into a glowingly lit interior as if viewed in passing from the street below.

We are constantly reminded through such devices as flat areas of colour and black outlines that what we are looking at is an artificial construction, an invented image, but Caulfield’s habit of representing the objects in his paintings and the rooms themselves at their actual size gives them an authority and presence that allows us at the same time to believe in their reality.

An intensely reserved and introspective man, Caulfield nevertheless had a great desire for social interaction and companionship. Restaurants and pubs held far more attractions for him than the studio, where he seemed to suffer in a particularly acute form from the anxieties of the creative life. In the 1980s and 1990s he rarely produced more than two or three paintings and a handful of prints in the course of a year; yet however small his output, his perfectionism and refusal to repeat himself ensured that his work was of a uniformly high standard.

Caulfield’s preference, especially in later years, for images of conviviality combining bright colours and decorative schemes with an austere and aloof visual language was very much in line with the contrary impulses that also motivated him outside the studio. He wished to exclude himself as far as possible from his art, making it as apparently objective, dispassionate and anonymous as the work of the 20th-century artists whom he most admired, such as that of Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. Nevertheless his paintings inevitably (and despite his protestations to the contrary) had much in common with his personality. Even his professed desire to escape from his own subjectivity was, in itself, the very mark of that temperament.