Adelaide-born urban landscape artist Jeffrey Smart has died in Italy at the age of 91.

Stuart Purves, one of his agents in Australia, said he had been unwell for some time and passed away peacefully at a hospital near his home at Arezzo overnight, with partner Ermes De Zan at his side.

Smart studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts and later at Academe Montmartre in Paris. He also taught art in Adelaide and Sydney. Purves told AAP he moved to Italy about 50 years ago to be “near the world’s great culture”.

National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood said Smart would be remembered as one of the greatest figurative painters in Australian art, while his agent and friend Philip Bacon described him as amusing, witty, determined and “a force of nature”.

A major retrospective of Smart’s work, Master of Stillness, saw more than 60 of his paintings exhibited in Adelaide last year at the Samstag Museum of Art and Carrick Hill. It charted his career from 1940 through to his most recent work, completed in 2011.

Barry Pearce, curator of the retrospective, told InDaily last year that the artist had emerged on the Adelaide art scene at a time when most modern Australian painting was focussed on pastoral landscapes. He said Smart changed the way people viewed the urban landscape by “taking the ugly and transforming it into the beautiful”.

“There were few paintings until then which took on the urban environment, seeing beauty in the wasteland, in street scenes and in the new technological age of the 20th century.  But Jeffrey took it front on and transformed it into a thing of beauty.”

When he was a boy, hard times forced Smart’s family to move from a garden suburb into a small apartment on South Terrace, and he found inspiration in the labyrinth-like laneways, streets, rooftops and backyards he could see from his room.

During a Talking Heads interview with Peter Thompson several years ago, he said of his boyhood home: “The kitchen looked over the tops of the slum houses. It was marvellous! I have a natural taste for squalor. I like high-density living.”

Pearce described Smart as “a fellow traveller of surrealism without being a true surrealist. He has the skill of realist painting, but it’s not quite realism, so it’s very hard to put a label on him”.

Smart declared his retirement from painting in 2011, but Pearce visited him in Italy in April last year and said that although he was confined to a wheelchair and required an oxygen tank to breath, his desire to paint was evident. “He said he still wakes up every day and thinks about painting.”

Purves said the artist lived a full life and was a slow and cautious painter who produced a small number of works every couple of years.

“I think he was one of the great milestones in our cultural well-being, a really significant person in that regard,” he said.

– With AAP