REBECCA Hind, who has died aged 59, was an artist whose work impressed the Royal Family and has been revered across Oxfordshire and the globe.

Ms Hind regularly exhibited her large-scale watercolour paintings and also painted reredos in Dorchester Abbey and at Christ Church, Spitalfields, in London.

At Dorchester Festival one year Prince Charles, an enthusiastic painter himself, asked to visit one of her exhibitions and praised her work.

She painted the scene of a presentation at Whitehall as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002.

Rebecca Hind was born in 1957 in Elland, near Halifax, to parents Catharine and Canon Stanley Hind, who was priest-in-charge of All Saints in the town.

Growing up with her older brother Martin, the family moved in 1967 to Carleton, near Pontefract, where she went to junior school.

She then joined Pontefract and District Girls' High School before earning a place at Bradford University's Art School.

It was here she met her future husband, Kevin Slingsby, who had been a fellow student, and the couple married in 1979 and had two children Tom and Holly.

They moved to Wales when Mr Slingsby took a teaching job at Cardiff University Art College.

In1981 he became a technician and tutor in fine art at Oxford University's Ruskin School of Art, a job which led the pair to settle in Dorchester-on-Thames.

She became a visiting tutor at the school and set up her own adult art classes along with a summer school.

Her Sacred Land project, bringing to life forgotten sites of spiritual significance across the county, was particularly popular.

As the main artist, she used her watercolour paintings to enable Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim communities to revive sacred gardens, wells and trails through art.

Having begun in 1997 as a three-year project, Sacred Land is still going today and led to her Sacred Journeys book published in 2009.

Her success led to frequent radio and TV appearances discussing art in relation to spirituality.

While she nursed her husband, who had incurable motor neurone disease, her work caught the attention of Prince Charles.

In 2002, as artists in residence at Banqueting House in Whitehall, she was selected by Royal officials to paint a presentation during the Queen's Golden Jubilee Celebrations rather than recording it on camera.

Her husband died in 2005 and she has chaired the Kevin Slingsby Prize for Funnel Vision awarded at the Ruskin School of Art ever since.

She put on a number of popular exhibitions in the last ten years of her life, including a selection of lunar painting for the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and her Causeway project exhibited at Curwen and New Academy Galleries in London.

She died on July 4 following a period of illness and hundreds attended her funeral at Dorchester Abbey.

She is survived by her mother Catharine, her son Tom, her daughter Holly and grandson Emiliano.