‘She went to her studio every day and no one was allowed near it’: the glorious nature paintings of Yasmin David

Her father was Laurie Lee, her mother the bohemian Lorna Garman, and the full extent of her talent wasn’t apparent until after her death. A revelatory exhibition places David at the heart of British landscape painting

When Clio David was growing up, her mother’s studio was off-limits. The wooden outbuilding where her mother, Yasmin, went to paint was in the apple orchards that surrounded her childhood home in south Devon. It had once been a dormitory for the students of Dartington Hall, a progressive school where Clio’s father taught during the 1960s.

“It was somewhere she went every day to paint and work, and no one was allowed near it,” says Clio. “The walls of our house were covered in her paintings, but the studio was a private place.”