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The worlds of British art and society were shell-shocked by news of the death of Lieutenant Rex Whistler, 2nd Welsh Guards, in 1944. Dashing, beloved, and only 39, the sublimely gifted artist had been one of the kingdom’s brightest young things for nearly two decades. His neck was broken in a mortar explosion, his battalion’s first casualty in the Normandy Invasion.

Whistler’s neo-Romantic versatility—slightly melancholic and greatly influenced by 17th- and 18th-century architecture and design—was widely admired and extensively (even eccentrically) employed. Ballerinas wore his delectable costumes and danced through his fanciful sets. Books bore his curlicue illustrations as well as fantastical bookplates made to order. Owners of noble country houses commissioned extravagant murals for their walls, notably the Marquess of Anglesey at Plas Newydd and Maud and Gilbert Russell at Mottisfont Abbey, where Whistler also speckled the drawing room’s white curtains with hand-painted black lozenges so the material looked like ermine. His artistry showed up on creamware for Wedgwood and printed chintz for Clovelly Silk (now being reproduced by the firm), and in portraits hanging on many a stately wall. Whistler even used his brush to improve fresh flowers, once arriving at the home of his American girlfriend, Tallulah Bankhead, with an armload of yellow and white tulips that he striped and dotted with black paint to make them less mundane. So brilliant was the artist’s theatrical work that his friend Cecil Beaton wistfully admitted that his own celebrated postwar career as a set and costume designer was largely due to Whistler’s untimely death.

That heady, tragically interrupted career is recalled at “In Search of Rex Whistler,” an exhibition on view through December 14 at the decorating firm Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler in London. Staged in the firm’s famous Yellow Room—once the studio of George IV’s architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville—the show is replete with brooding portraits of bygone dames, limpid romantic landscapes, and memorabilia galore tucked into elegant display cases.

Whistler’s rich career is also extensively examined in a new book, In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and His Work (Frances Lincoln), a captivating 272-page chronicle written by husband-and-wife historians Mirabel and Hugh Cecil. The overdue scholarly celebration is as suffused with poignant irony as it is with visual delights.

For instance, at the time of Whistler’s death—which occurred on his first day in battle—the artist had been appointed his battalion’s burial officer, one of his responsibilities being to hand-paint names on grave markers. His last known work, likely lost forever, may have been a Madonna and Child that he scrawled with charcoal on the wall of a ruined shrine in France. Two days later, Whistler stepped on a mortar shell, and his body was interred, a comrade later wrote, beneath “a crude cross of two pieces of boxwood, with his name printed on by myself, with a map pencil.”

Click here to see a selection of Whistler’s dazzling works.