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'Edward Burra: 20th Century Eye' by Jane Stevenson offers magnificent insight into the talented painter's life. By Alistair Sooke.

Edward Burra could be a difficult man. In 1961, when the Royal Academy rang to ask if he would consider becoming an associate, he shouted downstairs to his manservant, who had picked up the telephone: "Tell them to f*** off, I'm busy."

He painted compulsively but seldom attended his private views. When the Tate mounted a retrospective of more than 140 of his paintings in 1973, he visited the exhibition once.

In the run-up to the show, he complained that he felt badgered: "its like a night mare to me - very wrong Im sure but there it is," he wrote to a confidant.

The year before his Tate exhibition, he was the subject of a television documentary. After filming, he wrote to a different friend ranting about the questions posed by the presenter, who wanted to know "when this and when that & what date this & if I shat?…& what may I enquire has all that crap to do with Painting?"

Jane Stevenson's magnificent biography, her debut as a biographer and the first full-scale study of the artist's life and work, answers Burra's irritable question. "All that crap" has quite a lot to do with painting, after all.

Today Burra is neglected, frequently glossed over in histories of 20th-century British art. In part, this is because his work is so idiosyncratic (his motto was "Always join the minority"), and because he preferred watercolours to oils.

Best known for paintings executed in the 1920s and '30s depicting seedy urban scenes, he seems to stand apart from the modernist tradition.

At a time when the avant-garde was obsessed with abstraction, Burra was painting people: boozing sailors; dockside barmaids; zoot-suited hipsters hanging on Harlem street corners.

Stevenson suggests that it is time for reassessment. Burra resisted stylistic stagnation. He vigorously reinvented himself until he died in 1976, by which time he had turned to landscapes (then a strikingly unfashionable genre).

And although he could come across as cussed and cranky, to his friends he revealed a personality that glowed with warmth, generosity and wit.

He was born in Rye in Sussex in 1905, the second son of wealthy parents who could afford eight servants. A waiflike child, he suffered from anaemia and arthritis, and illness intermittently crippled him throughout his life.

By 16, he had enrolled at art school in London (first in Chelsea, then at the Royal College of Art), and he was soon whooping it up with a tight band of friends, many of whom remained close until his death.

His correspondence with them is the foundation of this biography. Burra's epistolary style is arch, gossipy and lightning quick. He had a withering disregard for spelling and grammar, and a gift for put-downs and nimble turns of phrase.

Stevenson has trawled through hundreds of "grubby" letters in Tate Britain's archives, and quotes these immensely entertaining missives at length.

During the 1920s, Burra mixed with a bohemian set of fast-living writers, dancers, lesbian socialites and men about town, whose intrigues he documented with relish in his letters. At heart, though, he was an observer.

While many around him got hooked on drugs (cocaine, morphine, heroin, Veronal), he intoxicated himself with art ("Painting is of course a sort of drug," he said). And while he was fascinated by the bed-hopping antics of his peers, he stayed celibate until his death.

Before the war, the strangeness of city life was his primary subject, and he spent much time browsing flea-markets, cafes, pubs and squalid dives, searching for the dissipated characters (hustlers, prostitutes, music-hall artistes) whom he painted in lush and lurid colours. His friend and mentor Paul Nash, whom he met in 1925 and who nurtured his career, called him the modern Hogarth.

Burra travelled extensively, soaking up Paris's seedy-chic demi-monde and the seamy side of Spain in the years before the Civil War, as well as spending time in Mexico. But it was America that really gripped him.

One evening, supposedly, he left Springfield Lodge, his parents' stucco mansion, where he lived until the 1950s, telling his mother that he was going into the garden. He didn't return for six months. During that time he lived in Harlem, drinking in speakeasies, and drawing pimps, prostitutes and drug-fiends.

The war blanched his paintings of impishness and mischief, and he turned to more sombre subjects such as bramble-tangled landscapes suggesting civilisation in retreat.

He refused to carry on producing work in the style that had made his name, choosing instead to paint uncharacteristic still lifes and semi-abstract flower paintings.

He became a heavy drinker, wasting away weekends getting plastered in Soho. During the 1960s, he loved to stay in Islington in north London, which he described as "full of ladies pickled in years of Guinness & gin & very scruffy" (A Sunday Morning at the Agricultural Arms, his bustling watercolour from 1975, records this period).

By then, he looked so dilapidated that he often had trouble getting a drink: "No wonder they wouldn't serve me - what I looked like - methylated spirit in person".

When he accepted a CBE in 1971, it was partly on the grounds that this might help to prevent publicans throwing him out. His cracked body eventually failed him five years later.

Burra was extraordinarily secretive and hated nothing more than for people to "Make a Fuss" on his behalf. This splendid Life makes a monumental fuss of him, reminding us what a one-off he was; but you sense that he would have been deeply pleased with the result.

My sole complaint is that only a single painting of his is reproduced: The Tea Shop, in which a naked waitress spills tea over a goggle-eyed customer, adorns the cover.