THE first large-scale gallery show of landscape and still-life works by the late Tom Fairs, who died last year, opens next Saturday at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate.

A devotee of French modern master Pierre Bonnard, Londoner Fairs painted continuously for many years and yet rarely showed his work in his lifetime, despite being both accomplished and prolific.

Born in 1925, Fairs left school at 15 to become a messenger boy at the Post Office, then won first prize in an art competition at work, duly encouraging him to attend evening classes at Hornsey School of Art. From there he progressed to the Royal College of Art, where he majored in stained glass design.

For the next 30 years, he taught at the Central School of Art and Design, while expressing an intention to draw and paint every single day. His 17 years of retirement finally enabled him to do so.

The Harrogate exhibition takes its title of Homage To Bonnard from his hero and mentor, an artist who achieved diversity and independence throughout his artistic life by distancing himself from the rest of the world. In this, Fairs and Bonnard were similar.

Like the Frenchman, the Londoner looked at the ordinariness of daily life with delight: he painted the view from his Hampstead window, the trees in the park, dusk falling over the Thames and the clutter on the kitchen table that he shared with writer Elisabeth Russell Taylor, his wife for 44 years.

He sought no publicity for his art and opted out of the gallery world, except for his loyalty to the Royal Academy summer exhibitions, where his work was selected every year for a quarter of a century.

Now, the Mercer Gallery puts Fairs in the spotlight in an exhibition of more than 40 landscape and still-life paintings, mainly oils on canvas and on paper, all of them for sale.

Jane Sellars, Harrogate Borough Council's curator of art, says: "Tom Fairs was an extraordinarily talented and prolific painter whose work was barely known outside London circles, so it's a great coup for the Mercer gallery to bring the artist's work to Harrogate."

Tom Fairs (1925-2007): Homage To Bonard will run from January 26 to April 20 at the Mercer Art Gallery, Swan Road, Harrogate.

Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm; Sundays, 2pm to 5pm; closed Mondays except Bank Holidays. Admission is free.