The exhibition, From Dark to Light, explores the work of artist Victor Noble Rainbird, who was born in North Shields in 1887.
The largest collection to have been staged since the 1930s, his favourite subjects were the North Sea and the streets and people of his hometown.
Curator Dave Young said there was a lot of affection for him in the town.
Many of the pieces on display at The Old Low Light Heritage Centre in North Shields have never been seen in public before.
Mr Young, said: "We hope that this exhibition will shed new light on the life and work of a remarkable man and also a much misunderstood artist.
"This is the first major exhibition of his paintings to be held in his hometown of North Shields since the artist's lifetime and it is being held in a building that he would have known well and often painted.
"Victor Noble Rainbird's paintings are a fascinating legacy of life in the North East before and after the Great War, while his own remarkable war record is only now being unravelled."
Mr Rainbird joined the Northumberland Fusiliers in 1914 when he was 26-years-old and served on the Western Front at Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge and Armentieres.
Some of the drawings he produced while on active service have survived and are included in the exhibition.
Mr Young said they were a "poignant, important and sombre record of the horrors of war".
After the war, Rainbird made several return trips to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, producing some of his most impressive works.
He died aged 47 in 1936.
From Dark to Light: exploring the life and art of Victor Noble Rainbird is on display at The Old Low Light Heritage Centre from 10 July to 6 September.

Panthers kept alive their title hopes and closed the gap on leaders Devils to four points.
Two goals from Matthew Myers put Panthers in control before Joey Martin replied.
Franklin MacDonald, Geoff Waugh and Evan Mosey's two goals secured the win.
The sides meet again in the Challenge Cup final at the Sheffield Arena on Sunday.

The claim: England and Wales have the highest incarceration rate per head of the population in Western Europe.
Reality Check verdict: In 2014 England and Wales did indeed have the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, marginally ahead of Scotland.
Together with former home secretaries Jacqui Smith and Ken Clarke, he had written a letter to the Times calling for the prison population in England and Wales to be cut from the current level of more than 85,000 to the level in 1993 of about 45,000.
They referred to 1993 as being the year in which Michael Howard said that "prison works".
The prison population grew rapidly after that point, especially in the following five years. In the last five years it has been pretty much static at about 85,000.
Since 1993 the prison population has almost doubled over a period when the overall population of England and Wales has grown by about 17%.
Mr Clegg was only talking about England and Wales because in the rest of the UK the justice system is a devolved power, controlled by the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
He also said: "We already have higher rates of incarceration per head of the population than anywhere else in Western Europe."
This chart based on Eurostat figures for 2014 shows that England and Wales is indeed ahead of the rest of Western Europe with 146 prisoners per 100,000 population, narrowly ahead of Scotland's 145. Northern Ireland had 93 prisoners per 100,000 population.
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