Eaerl Haig died he was 91

George Alexander Eugene Douglas Haig was the only son of Field Marshal Earl Haig and the Honourable Dorothy Vivian, daughter of the 3rd Lord Vivian.

He was educated at Stowe and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history. He was commissioned into the Royal Scots Greys as a university entrant in 1938.

On return to England in 1945 he studied at the School of Arts and Crafts at Camberwell and subsequently divided his life between the family estate at Bemersyde, where he welcomed his ever-widening circle of artistic friends, his painting and duties to the Earl Haig Fund services charity in Scotland and as Chief of the Haig family.

Although he returned again and again to painting his favourite Border country around Bemersyde and the Tweed, he also produced many works of Venice and the Veneto. He had his first London exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1949 and at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh the same year.

One painting of this period was The Mailbag Sewer, from a series of prison visits to encourage art as a therapy for delinquents. His friendship with Victor Pasmore and Paul Klee stimulated his search for a personal style, yet his gentle and modest personality led to an absorption with the subject rather than expression. Lawrence Gowing strongly influenced his landscape work.

Paul Maze, who became a close friend when Haig bought a cottage near his home after the war, gave him a freer and more intuitive vision, and his landscapes became increasingly marked by the nervous energy of the drawn line. The critic Douglas Hall remarked on the strength of his “skeletal drawings in black” as the hallmark of his work, especially of Bemersyde with its “dyke-defined fields, crowblack fir woods and tall, splay-branched silvers”.

In the lower Dolomites — his second wife’s family home — Haig found an affinity with his native Border country in the clear light, the drama of the mountains and the uneven tumble of undergrowth, rock and river. He showed paintings with the Scottish Gallery consistently for more than 50 years.

He welcomed the editing of his father’s diaries and papers by Robert (later Lord) Blake which were published in 1953. Although there was some opposition to their publication, notably from Lord Trenchard, the former Chief of the Air Staff, Haig felt that they presented the Field Marshal in a fairer light, but would have preferred the press not to have focused on the implied criticism of Marshal Foch. He was particularly appreciative of the campaign, mounted in 2008, to rehabilitate his father’s reputation, based on his final offensive in 1918.

Haig was a member of the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland, of the Royal Fine Art Commission for Scotland 1958-61 and of the council and executive committee of the Earl Haig Fund for Scotland 1950-65, being appointed OBE for this work in 1966, president of the Scottish Arts Council 1980-86 and of the Scottish Craft Centre 1950-75.

He was a trustee of the National Gallery of Scotland 1962-72 and was involved with many other charities and trusts, in particular those associated with the Armed Services and the blind.

His marriage in 1956 to Adrienne Thérèse Morley was dissolved in 1981, when he married Donna Geroloma Lopez y Royo di Taurisano. He is survived by his second wife, a son and two daughters of his first marriage. The son, Viscount Dawick, succeeds to the Earldom.