The door was always open at Peggy Angus’s Sussex home.

It made Furlongs, the artist and teacher’s simple retreat beneath Beddingham Hill in the South Downs, a place of creativity and conviviality, according to the writer and artist Olive Cook.

Cook wondered, in her article about life at the house, A Test Of Friendship, why so many continued to visit despite the outdoor privy and cold tap.

She concluded, “It is a place where the cramping materialistic values of today cease to exist.”

Her old friend, Sussex artist Eric Ravilious, writing to Angus in July 1939, thanked her for finding the place.

“Furlongs altered my whole outlook and way of painting. I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious.”

Angus, an eccentric, outspoken and formidable character known to many as “the Red Angus” (the father of Eric Ravilious’s wife, Colonel Garwood, also used the term “a Bolshie woman” to describe her), refused to modernise.“She wasn’t keen on modern life,” explains James Russell, author of a new book about the pioneering lady which coincides with a new exhibition of her life’s work at Towner in Eastbourne.

“She was a bit of Luddite. She didn’t drive. She travelled everywhere by train or walked, and she would always say I’ve no idea how to make the radio work.

“Her grandchildren used to put Radio 4 on with big red bit of tape.”

Though she dealt with tragedy – she lost a teenage son to epilepsy, her husband divorced her leaving her with two young children – she never lost her sociability and spirit.

Indeed, thinks Russell, such was her love for discussion she would have embraced social media if she were a young woman alive today. Its utility would be the reason. She loved practical and inventive creativity.

“She believed artists should serve the wider society. She found being a painter frustrating because it wasn’t getting her anywhere; she wasn’t helping in any way.”

Angus, overlooked in the art world and in the public apart from an impressive portrait of John Piper which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, spurned her dream to be a painter to study in the design school at the Royal College of Art. There she met sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, painters Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, and illustrators Barnett Freedman and Enid Marx.

But the person who perhaps had the biggest effect on her approach was William Morris, the multi-talented designer, writer and socialist.

The influential designer from the Arts And Crafts Movement produced some of the most fashionable and exciting textiles and wallpapers of his era through his company, Morris & Co.

Angus, still best known for her tile patterns, made work for the Festival of Britain in 1951, a “live exhibit” for Susan Lawrence School in Poplar, stunning designs for the British Industries Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels International Exhibition and tile motifs for new buildings at Gatwick Airport. Her tile murals are still available via Blithfield and you might be staring at her work on wallpaper or tea towels without knowing it.

“She wanted art to matter to everyone and like William Morris she felt the reason it didn’t was because people were shut off from it,” explains Russell.

Thus, on retirement from teaching (she held the post of head of art at the North London Collegiate School for Girls), she devoted her time to working with older people and encouraging them to make art.

“She believed everybody should be involved in art - as an artist or as a creative patron which was equally important.”

After meeting Diana Hall, a farmer’s wife whose lodger had put on a theatre performance in her barn, she convinced Hall the solution to her problem of finding new tiles for her kitchen could be solved at home.

A short while later they were working together as Angus Designs. Hall later had a long career in the tile business.

Angus produced a hand- written pamphlet, A Plea For Creative Patronage, outlining her ideals and rejecting the market-based contemporary art world.

“CREATIVE PATRONAGE is an enjoyable activity. It should be productive of situations where people are inspired to contribute something far beyond their known capacity, not only for sale, but as enrichment of experience and environment.”

l Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter, published by Antique Collectors’ Club, is out now.

l The exhibition will include her early illustrations, portraits and landscape paintings, and her Modernist design work with wallpapers and tiles.