A neglected Chichester painter is remembered by her daughter in a new volume, Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist (Dornberger Books, £14).

It is available from Pallant House Gallery, Chichester or order via tinyurl.com/Buy-Sheila and comes from Hastings-based Teresa Thornhill, aged 68.

Teresa explained: “My new book, Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist is an intimate examination of the life of Sheila Denning, one of the many women painters who worked in Britain in the twentieth century, but whose work received little or no attention from the art establishment. Sheila lived and worked in Chichester from 1971 to 2001. She was my mother and I grew up witnessing her struggle to paint and to be taken seriously by the art establishment as a woman artist in the 1960s and 1970s. The book is a memoir and quite a personal one.

“Born in 1920 to an Anglo-Irish family, Sheila lost her favourite brother in WWII. In the grief-filled years that followed, and despite a dispiriting experience at Camberwell School of Art, she painted a series of compelling self-portraits which I talk about in detail in the book.

“Once married, Sheila allowed the needs of her clay-worker husband (my father) to set the agenda and her career floundered. But in the late 1960s, newly separated and a lone parent, she moved with me and my sister first to Pagham then to Chichester.

“It was here that she produced a stream of extraordinary portraits of people in her immediate circle. These were brave, honest paintings, the work of an artist who looked deeply into the faces of her sitters.

“I started writing three years after Sheila’s death in 2015. I too am an artist and my initial approach was to interrogate Sheila’s paintings with my own painter’s eyes. I read through a large box of family letters, some dating from as far back as the 1930s, and learned a lot about Sheila’s childhood and war-time experiences.

“Sheila left an incomplete autobiography and a series of poems and I’ve quoted from these in the book. I’ve also dramatised a handful of incidents I remember from childhood, including a couple from my teenage years in Sussex. The narrative is driven forward by my deep affection for Sheila and my desire to understand who she was.

“The book is illustrated with 22 colour plates of Sheila’s paintings and eight photographs. It will appeal to people interested in the arts and the historic struggles of women artists in particular; but also to those who know nothing about art but enjoy a good mother-daughter memoir.”

Teresa is a retired lawyer and now full-time writer and painter. Her writer’s website is at www.teresathornhill.com. Her other books (more detail on the website) include – In Harm’s Way: the Memoir of a Child Protection Lawyer, pub Harper Collins 2024; Hara Hotel: a Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece, pub Verso 2018; The Curtain Maker of Beirut: Conversations with the Lebanese, pub Berkshire Academic Press 2012; and Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey through Iraqi Kurdistan, pub Harper Collins 1997.