After a nervous breakdown in 1953 when he graduated from the Royal College of Art, Woodrow became consumed by work and filled every room of his Leeds home with 3,500 drawings, paintings and sculptures. Only one was ever exhibited.

Although he studied alongside internationally famous artists like Frank Auerbach and Peter Blake, the art world has never heard of him and his family had begun burning his sculptures on a bonfire before his discovery last year.

For 50 years he worked as a re-clusive artist, using anything that came to hand to feed his compulsion. Coal and potato sacks, cornflake packets and advertising boards became his canvasses. Furniture, including his piano, was broken up to be recycled as sculptures.

But art critic Nicholas Usherwood says an introductory exhibition in Harrogate could be the first chapter marking the emergence of a "previously unacknowledged and quite astonishingly powerful and original creative in-telligence in post-war British art".

Much of Woodrow's work was damaged by smoke in a fire at his home in Allerton Grange Gardens, Leeds, in 1999 – but he moved back in the same night and carried on with his frantic workload, stacking one painting on top of another while they were still wet so that they bonded together.

He is one of seven sons and two daughters of Polish immigrants, whose father, Naphtalie, worked as a Hebrew scholar and bookseller in Chapeltown Road, Leeds, before moving into the textile trade. Woodrow painted his last picture in 2000 when he became too ill to continue living alone.

When his brother, Saul, and sister-in-law, Sylvia, began clearing the house, paintings and collages he had made on the pages of bound volumes of art magazines found their way to the Richard Axe bookshop in Harrogate, where they were seen by painter Christopher Wood. He was so excited that he called in specialist picture conservator Andrew Stewart, of 108 Contemporary Fine Art in Harrogate, who was astounded by what he found at the house.

"There was an entire lifetime's work that had never been looked at," he said.

"I had never heard of the artist, but I could see immediately that it was a very experienced, compet-