Movement was her life-long passion; dancers, horses and riders, people meeting and even the pigeons who flew past her studio window, all became the subject for her vivid drawings and paintings. But it was as a painter of musicians in performance that she made her unique contribution to art.

Born Dorothy Bassadona in April 1918, in Cockermouth, she subsequently lived in Liverpool, London, Ilkley, Formby and Nantwich in Cheshire.

During the war she worked for CEMA in London (the war-time forerunner of the Arts Council) and attended classes at the Central School with Raymond Coxon and at St Martin's with Ruskin Spear. In London too she went to concerts and ballet performances and began the life-long practice of drawing at rehearsals where repetition gave her time to capture, in fast and fluid lines, the essence of a phrase or movement.

The dancers she drew at rehearsals included Robert Helpmann, Frederick Ashton and Margot Fonteyn. She would draw dancers again 40 years later at the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars.

In 1940 she married Don Bradford, a manager for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. When they and their children lived in Ilkley, Dory (as she was known to all) attended Maurice de Saumarez's influential lectures at Leeds University. While her family were growing up in Ilkley she continued to work and had many exhibitions, in public and private galleries, regionally and nationally, over the years. But it was passion, not ambition, that drove her.

Sometimes it was decades before she used a drawing: her 2001 painting of Maxim Shostakovitch conducting his father's music arose from drawings done 30 years earlier. They provided her with the rhythms, shapes and structures that made her paintings so powerfully evocative of the original musical experience.

The relationships between maestro and pupil, conductor and orchestra and between members of ensembles fascinated her, while her studies of pianists made when she was official artist to the Leeds Piano Competition are exceptional. Musicians were great admirers of her work – there are paintings by her at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

In her last years she continued to paint with undiminished vigour and there was a steady stream of appreciative art lovers to her door. They also came to enjoy her sense of humour, inspiring zest for life and wide-ranging conversation about art, music, life and poetry - as well as a glass of something good.

Dory's gift for friendship extended to everyone she met, whether artists, market stallholders, great musicians or her fellow swimmers in Nantwich's open air brine pool.

On the day of her death Dory had been with her daughter Rachel hanging an exhibition in Nantwich Museum. At Nantwich Parish Church two paintings, one of a horn player, the other of a tuba player, lent for the town's arts festival, were hanging in the nave as friends and family gathered to remember her.

She is survived by her three sisters and three children Judy, Rachel and Hugh as well as four grandchildren.