My mother, Rosalie Williams, who has died aged 99, was a landscape painter and ecclesiastical embroidery artist based in Sussex, where she lived for much of her life.
Her paintings were exhibited in various locations in the county, including at the Ditchling Gallery (1960 and 1965) and at the Chichester arts festival (1969). She was commissioned to provide embroidery works for a number of church buildings, the best known of which was a series of 12 large hangings in Chichester Cathedral to mark its 900th anniversary in 1975.
Over the years Rosalie earned her living as a visiting art lecturer, including at the University of London, Surrey University, Brighton Polytechnic (now the University of Brighton) and West Dean College in West Sussex.
She was born in Bromley, Kent, to Leslie Williams, a textile manufacturer, and his wife, Lilian (nee Batchelor). After Moreton Hall school in Shropshire she trained at the Slade School of Art in Oxford between 1942 and 1945 (it had been evacuated there from London), then did a postgraduate year in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1948-49), where she acquired a love of France that never left her.
On her return she married the actor Hugh Sinclair in 1949, and held her first solo exhibition at the Walker Gallery in London in 1950, the year she was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Her renown as a highly skilled ecclesiastical embroiderer emerged in the 1970s, when she was commissioned to take on a series of works, beginning with St Hugh’s Charterhouse in Cowfold, West Sussex, and then at West Wittering church.
The hangings in Chichester Cathedral were made in collaboration with Yvonne Hudson, with whom she had been a student at Slade. They were created in less than six months with the help of 15 volunteers who devoted hundreds of hours to the task. Later one of her most intricate and beautifully executed works was the altar frontal embroidery at East Chiltington church in East Sussex, made in 1988.
Rosalie’s paintings in oil and watercolour revealed a refined sense of colour and reflected her love of the English countryside, especially the South Downs and the woodlands, streams, rivers and lakes around her home near Lewes. However, as a fluent French speaker and Francophile, she never missed an opportunity to cross the Channel, and every morning of her adult life she listened to the French news on the radio.
Hugh died in 1962. She is survived by their two children, Christina and me, two granddaughters and three great-grandchildren.
