“I know you’ve been painting because I can smell the turps.” This was Roger Hilton, one of the pioneers of British abstract art, to his wife Rose. The scene for this declaration was the couple’s home in Botallack, a remote village in the far west of Cornwall; its timing a few years into their often tumultuous but enduring marriage.

Rose had infringed one of the fundamental tenets of their relationship: “We’d been together for a little while when one day Roger said to me: ‘It’s working, you and I, but I’m the painter in this set-up – and don’t forget it.’ That was the way it was. He was the artist. I was the wife and mother.”

Roger Hilton died in 1975, aged 63. Already widely known at the time of his death – in some quarters, as much for his acerbic tongue as his painting – his stature has since grown so that he is recognised, along with Sir Terry Frost and Patrick Heron, among the key figures in post-1950s British art.

But as her first solo retrospective at the Tate St Ives opens, Rose Hilton shows herself to be as deserving of recognition as her late husband. This is a painter whose understanding of colour and tone is exceptional, whose canvases are soft, beguiling, nuanced and diffuse, and whose sense of fidelity to her work is, ultimately, every bit as uncompromising as Roger’s.

Rose Hilton, née Phipps, was born in Kent, in 1931, into a devout Plymouth Brethren family. She showed great promise at the Royal College of Art in London, winning the Life Drawing and Painting prize as well as the Abbey Miner Scholarship to Rome. Upon her return to London, she began teaching art, and, aged 28, her life “was all mapped out. I was painting and showing my work, I had a nice flat in Chelsea. Then I met Roger.”

He was 20 years her senior. The pair met through another luminary of British abstract art, Sandra Blow, who described Roger, a wartime commando, as “Trouble”. Despite this, by the summer of 1959 Rose had sought out Roger, whom she found “incredibly charming and fascinating”, in his Newlyn studio. But Roger Hilton’s qualities did not extend to encouragement of his wife’s artistic needs. His prohibition on her painting will strike contemporary ears as the most remarkable chauvinism, but perhaps as surprising is that Rose accepted it without demur. Tall, slender and still, at 75, languorous and feline, she appears self-possessed and certain, not the kind of woman to kow-tow to a man. But hindsight provides perspective. “I believe in feminism but came from a generation that missed out on it,” she says. “Perhaps I could have made a wiser decision in dealing with him, but I was very much in love with Roger. He had tremendous integrity as an artist, which was something I needed in my life. I also had my children, and so was fulfilled in another way.”

The Hiltons, with their sons Bo and Fergus, decamped from London to Cornwall in 1965. By then they were married, and despite his penchant for disruption, Roger’s star was on the ascendant. Rose is typically candid: “He could be terribly rude and provocative. But he was never violent, even when he was drinking.”

In Cornwall, drinking became somewhat more than a pastime for Roger Hilton. Repeated attempts to dry out failed, though Rose notes wryly that her husband postponed one relapse long enough to attend Buckingham Palace, sober, to collect his CBE. Curiously, Roger’s drinking enabled Rose’s own modest transgression, for when he was drinking, she could – covertly – paint. “Roger would often go off drinking with Sydney [Graham, the poet]. When he was gone, and with the boys at school, I would paint.”

Just before Roger took to his bed for his last years, she was discovered. “He smelled the turps again and asked me to show him what I’d been doing – a still life. It was a very exciting, but fearful, moment for me.” Roger’s verdict? “He said: ‘If you must do this old-fashioned painting, I can help you do it better.’ I learnt more from him in an hour than I did in the whole of art school.”

After his death in 1975 Rose grieved terribly for Roger: “I was very overwrought. It took a while for me to get unbent.” But immersion in her work – so long deferred – was inevitable and essential. Two years later, in 1977, she had her first solo show at Newlyn Art Gallery, and the next 25 years brought numerous exhibitions around the country and especially at Messum’s, in Cork Street.

She lives quietly in Botallack, in the same cottage to which the couple moved in the 1960s. Outside the ancient granite cottage, the Atlantic pounds the cliffs and the abandoned tin mines are visible, while along the coast at St Ives, Rose’s show at the Tate opened its doors this morning. It is tempting to see her work – at once subtle and intimate, elegant and controlled, each painting irreducibly feminine – in opposition to the masculine hardness, of gaze and line, in Roger’s canvases. But she can now lay claim to a body of work which, in its post-impressionist, figurative roots allied with an increasing tendency to abstraction, is individual, vibrant and compelling.

Bonnard and Matisse are obvious influences, but she has created an artistic language so much her own that it is easy to agree with Roger’s biographer Andrew Lambirth who, introducing a 2004 show at Messum’s, wrote: “[Her] pictures proclaim a single author. In their freshness and lyricism, in the assured design and inventive palette, above all in their edgily balanced description and decorativeness, these pictures could only be by Rose Hilton.”

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Life in pictures

‘Rose Hilton: A Selected Retrospective’, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, to May 11. Drawings by Rose Hilton at the HiltonYoung Gallery, Penzance to March 6, and at Messum’s, Cork St, London until February 23. www.tate.org.uk/stives www.hiltonyoung.com www.messums.com