My father, John Heaton Cooper, who has died aged 73, was an insightful businessman who created a flourishing art venue in the Lake District in which to display the works of his family and others. He ran the gallery, the Heaton Cooper Studio, for 35 years and turned it into a tourist attraction with more than 96,000 visitors each year.

Born in Windermere, Cumbria, John was the son of the landscape artist William Heaton Cooper and his wife, the sculptor Ophelia Gordon Bell. His grandfather was the artist Alfred Heaton Cooper. John was educated until the age of seven at Grasmere school, then at Earnseat preparatory school, Arnside, and Heversham grammar school, leaving when he was 16. He was a keen and accomplished climber and member of the Wayfarers’ Club.

As a teenager he would ride his motorbike around the Lakes, wearing the jacket worn by John Hunt on the successful 1953 Everest expedition. His mother, Ophelia, had sculpted portraits of Hunt and Edmund Hillary; Hunt subsequently gave the jacket to John.

At the same time, he worked behind the bar with Sid Cross, the proprietor of the Old Dungeon Ghyll hotel in Langdale. If there was a climber or walker in trouble, Sid and John would grab a stretcher from behind the bar and they would head off into the night to find the casualty.

When John left school, he went to work in an insurance company in Liverpool, but his passion was rock climbing and he soon got bored with the job. So he moved to London to work in a mountaineering outfitters on Kensington High Street, where he would put together the kit for big expeditions. Later he worked for several years in the Lancashire textile industry, but joined the family art studio in 1976.

His business acumen and visionary mindset brought about the realisation of his father’s dream of creating an artistic space devoted to mountain art. The studio he lovingly created and nurtured is now home to an archive of works by the Heaton Cooper family and an exhibition space.

I took over as director several years ago but until recently my father was still working there on a daily basis. Thanks to him, the Heaton Cooper Studio exhibits world-leading mountain art, capturing the magnificence and beauty of rock and fell, stream and lake – subject matter close to his heart.

In 1963 he married Lesley Rushton and they had three children. They divorced in 1975 and he subsequently married Margaret Keeling. She survives him, as do his children, Miles, Martin, and me, five grandchildren, a brother, Julian, and two sisters, Otalia and Clare.