HUNDREDS of paintings produced by a “shy” though highly acclaimed artist, who lived for a significant part of his career in Herefordshire, are due to go under the hammer later this year.

A prolific but relatively unknown painter, the late John Cherrington, who moved from London to Hereford in 1977, produced some of his best work based on pencil sketches of those people he studied in High Town and St Peter’s Square.

Fine art auctioneers, Rogers Jones have received instructions from the artist’s executors, and the first in a series of sales is due to be held at their Cardiff saleroom on June 1.

As Cherrington, who died in Llandudno three years ago, was said to be “rather shy of the art market”, he accumulated more than 800 paintings during his career, said David Rogers Jones.

He lived and worked from his home in Newton St Margarets in the Golden Valley, the Hereford Times reporting in 1980 that his work in acrylics was “stimulated by the visual world around him which he found both tormenting and marvellous”.

He drew sketches of local characters and produced paintings of bulls for local farmers, and was known to sketch customers in pubs.

He taught at Hereford College of Art and also illustrated children’s nature books and weekly comics.

Despite his reluctance to put his work forward, no fewer than seven of his portraits was accepted by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters between 1969 and 1974.

Among these was a study of the charismatic Lord ‘Rab’ Butler, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary who was credited with creating the modern educational system.

As Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, this portrait shows the subject in cap and gown.

Cherrington studied at Hornsea Art College and went to Paris at the age of 16 to study art and art history. He served in the Army for eight years, qualified as an art teacher and taught art in London until moving to Herefordshire.

As a friend of Holocaust survivor, the artist Edith Birkin, work by both painters was featured in an exhibition by the Tuesday Group at the Hereford City Art Gallery in 1985.

Cherrington was said to have had a fascination with age, and an exhibition in the Old Mayor’s Parlour at Hereford with Hay-on-Wye poet Anne Stevenson was based on the Three Ages – youth, maturity and age.