It will be 10 years next month since the light of golf’s most gloriously untamed talent was extinguished. If Severiano Ballesteros was adored while he lived, his mystique has only been enriched in death, with legions of fans writing to his three children to announce that they have named their sons after him. Marking the decade since his passing at the age of 54 will be an extraordinary book, Seve: His Life Through the Lens, drawing together the defining images of his career and dozens of previously unseen pictures from his family albums.

Beyond all other qualities, Ballesteros is revered, in the words of R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers, as the “supreme showman”. Nobody documented his on-course theatrics more prodigiously than David Cannon, the doyen of golf photographers, who has compiled this collection. Cannon would liken his work with Ballesteros to the pursuit of a wild animal, but it was a chase that yielded indelible insights into his character.

Ballesteros’ eldest son, Javier, has resolved to carry the torch, not just as a professional golfer in his own right but as the curator of his memory. Here, in the company of Javier, is a detailed study of 16 portraits that help to tell Seve’s singular story.

The infant Seve appears in his element as he poses with his cows. The reality, much to his parents’ exasperation, was rather different. One day, he and his elder brother Vicente had been instructed to tend the family livestock, only to abandon them in a field and sneak on to the fairways at Pedrena Golf Club for a surreptitious round. By the time the church bell rang, their cue to shepherd the cows back to the farm, the animals were nowhere to be seen.

“He had been hitting three-irons instead of looking after them,” Javier explains. “And so they just disappeared.” It transpired that the cows had wandered off into the heart of the village, where Seve would spend five hours rounding them up.

Baldomero Ballesteros, Seve’s father, was a product of Pedrena’s agrarian culture, a tough dairy farmer who would inform his five sons that they needed to earn their keep by caddying for the gentleman golfers. On the side, he was a Cantabrian rowing champion, joining crews of traineras who would navigate their fixed-row fishing boats through the boiling waves funnelling into the boy.

Politically, too, he led quite the life. Baldomero was a loyal Franquista throughout the Spanish Civil War, and when Santander sought to repel the advance of Franco’s Republican forces, he showed his disgust at being ordered to join the resistance by shooting himself in his left hand. For this, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. But before the punishment could be applied, he needed treatment for his injury. It turned out to be his cue to escape from the hospital and enlist on Franco’s side regardless.

This picture from the family archive underlines the close bond that Baldomero and Seve shared. “I never got to know him, but Dad described how his father had been very important in his life and career,” Javier remembers. “My grandfather always taught him to work hard in everything he did.”

Ballesteros’ connection to golf was forged originally through his mother, Carmen. She was the sister of Ramon Sota, the club professional in Pedrena, who had brought significant prestige to his people by winning four Spanish championships. But her life was engulfed by tragedy when her eldest son, Manuel, passed away after being set upon by a swarm of wasps. The two-year boy, nicknamed Manolo, had been drawn by cart through local fields when the donkey put its foot through the insects’ nest. He succumbed to his injuries 12 hours later, sending Carmen into such grief that she sought guidance from the village priest. But still her brood expanded, and on April 9, 1957, her fifth son, Severiano, was born.

Carmen is in her old age in this picture, practising her putting under Seve’s gaze. She died in 2002, but for Javier, only 12 at the time, the memories are still vivid. “She used to live just next to us, and we made a life with her. She was fantastic, constantly looking after us.”

After bringing up Seve in a tumbledown cottage above a barn, was she taken aback by the global fame he acquired through golf? “No, my dad liked just be part of the village. People didn’t look at him differently because he was a golf star – he was just one more person.”

Ballesteros was such a devoted football fan that even when he lay on his hospital bed in 2010, recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumour, he sent a stirring call to arms to players at his beloved Racing Santander, urging them to overcome a four-goal deficit in their Copa del Rey semi-final against Atletico Madrid.

His depth of support for his boyhood club was matched by his love of playing. In this picture, at a match organised during the 1984 Spanish Open at Parador de El Saler, just outside Valencia, he is hurling himself into a full-blooded tackle that looks, at best, dubiously timed. “I saw this picture the other day for the first time,” Javier laughs. “No matter what sport he did, he gave everything, every time.”

Here, Ballesteros relaxes after the final whistle with his football team-mate Manuel Pinero, with whom he had won the World Cup of Golf in 1976. Away from the course, his sporting passions had the widest range. He was an ardent boxing follower, keeping a recording of a conversation he had enjoyed with Muhammad Ali.

Similarly, he adored cycling, riding out in the early mornings in Pedrena and counting five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain among his dearest friends. “Every summer,” Javier reflects, “we would sit down for lunch in the early weeks of July and watch the Tour de France for three, fours a day.”

At the home of his maternal grandparents, Javier celebrates a birthday with his brother Miguel and sister Carmen. It is a window into family bliss that continues to bring him pleasure. Even today, wherever he travels on the professional golf circuit, he seldom wants for a reminder of how much fans idolise Seve.

“After 10 years, people keep sending stories, photos to us, like it was yesterday,” he says. “Six years ago, I was playing a Challenge Tour event in Northern Ireland. I was on the driving range, and the bodyguard said to me, ‘There’s a guy asking for you.’ The man announced, ‘This little guy is two, and he’s called Seve after your dad.” It’s amazing how the fans are with me. My dad was a great golfer but he made a deep impression in other people’s lives.”

Ballesteros would often refer to Pedrena as “my paradise”. Even though it had been known to rain for 50 days straight on Spain’s Costa Verde, it was amid this quiet Cantabrian community where he felt the deepest contentment. No matter if he had been playing in Japan or Jamaica, he could scarcely wait to return to his house overlooking the Bay of Santander.

His happiness is self-evident in a picture of him alongside his three children, Javier, Miguel and Carmen, in a moment when the vagaries of his golf game can be left behind. “This was taken in Polaciones, about an hour’s drive from Pedrena,” Javier explains.

“I remember every detail of that day – we still have the photo in our kitchen. I observed my dad’s connection to the region and I observe it in myself, too. I have travelled to many wonderful places but this is the best environment to return to. It’s my happy place, and I believe it was his.”

For all that Ballesteros was a friend to the stars, giving golf lessons to Johan Cruyff and attending awards ceremonies with Sir Bobby Charlton, his domestic life was devoid of affectation. “I still tell my mum,” Javier says, “that one of the things I’m most grateful for is that she and my dad gave us all a normal education, nothing different. Dad was extremely affectionate, hugging us all the time, thinking of us in all he did.

"He was a much better father than golfer. And that wasn’t easy, because he was a very good golfer.”

In a photograph never before seen outside the Ballesteros family, two Spanish icons are brought together at the same restaurant table. The year is 2006, and two places to Seve’s left is a 20-year-old Rafael Nadal, already a double French Open champion. Between them sits lawyer Ramon Calderon, then president of Real Madrid, who in a show of his string-pulling power had arranged for them to play a morning round at the ritzy Club de Campo, on Madrid’s western outskirts.

“It was a wonderful day,” says Javier, pictured in the foreground and blessed at just 16 with an audience to remember.

Holidays for the Ballesteros family were spent every winter on the pistes of Switzerland, as Seve indulged his wife Carmen’s love of skiing. “Mum was passionate about it, but Dad didn’t get involved, as he worried he would be injured for golf,” Javier says. His parents had first been introduced when Carmen’s father, Emilio, the aristocratic head of the Bank of Santander, had sent her for golf lessons.

It would be a while before they enjoyed their first formal date, over afternoon tea at a Surrey hotel while Carmen completed her education in Ascot. Their marriage created a fascinating dynamic for the Spanish media: the daughter of a marquise and the son of an agricultural labourer. It is to Carmen that Javier, in his opening letter for this latest book, expresses gratitude for her role in the fraught years since his father’s passing.

“Mum has been the one who has carried us through difficult moments,” he writes, “encouraging us to carry our dad’s legacy in the best possible way.”

It is an image of harmony and serenity that cuts against the 1991 Ryder Cup’s billing as “the War on the Shore”. For all the bellicose US rhetoric around that contest, stoked by the Gulf War and Corey Pavin’s decision to wear a camouflage cap with the Marines logo, Ballesteros and Jose Maria Olazabal sailed on through the tumult regardless.

Their handshake after a Saturday evening half, silhouetted against the South Carolina sunset, captures the essence of the most successful partnership in the competition’s history, one that yielded 12 points from their 15 matches together.

“You can’t see their faces, but you know it’s the two of them straight away,” Javier says. “I know I was there, because my mum had taken me there at 13 months old on Concorde. She has kept a little certificate to say that I was on board.”

Exactly 21 years later, Javier and Carmen found themselves watching with mounting incredulity as the European team produced the “Miracle of Medinah”, overturning a 10-6 deficit with an unforgettable singles surge. Few sights carried such pathos as that of Olazabal invoking the spirit of Ballesteros, who had passed away 17 months earlier, pulling his visor down over his eyes to hide his tears.

“I especially remember Justin Rose pointing to a logo of my dad on his sleeve,” Javier recalls. “We really appreciated what he did. My father’s game was always fired up for Ryder Cups. In matchplay, you can play so much more aggressively, and his desire to beat the Americans was always extremely high.”

Deep in the Swiss Alps, in the woods carpeting the slopes of Crans-Montana, there is a patch of ground from which no golfer has any business trying to escape. And yet here lies a plaque in tribute to perhaps the most audacious shot Ballesteros ever struck.

At the 1993 European Masters, he needed to finish with a sixth straight birdie to sustain any hope of victory, but fanned his drive 60 yards right, the ball settling almost adjacent to a concrete wall. Ignoring the pleading of caddie Billy Foster to lay up, he played the hero, threading a pitching wedge through a gap in the branches no larger than a human hand.

“I played this tournament three years ago, and I went back to the same spot,” Javier reflects. “I have no idea how he got that ball over the wall, even over a swimming pool. Even more incredible was the fact that after doing that, he chipped in. For anyone else, I would say it was impossible.”

Was he tempted to try this extraordinary conjuring trick himself? “No, I saw it was too tough and I didn’t want to hurt myself. I thought, ‘He has done it properly, let’s leave it like that.’”

Having been imbued from a tender age with the folklore around his father, Javier was determined that the two of them should savour an inside-the-ropes experience before it was too late. As such, he implored Seve to enter one final Open so that he could caddie for him.

“He wasn’t practising much at the time, because of his back, but I went to him and said, ‘Dad, you won the Open three times, you can play whenever you want.’ Straight away, he replied, ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. I’m not playing my best golf, but I will do it for you.’”

For 36 holes at Royal Liverpool, in the company of Ian Poulter and Shaun Micheel, they shared in the poignancy of Seve’s last stand on British soil. While Ballesteros’ golf was ragged, leaving him eight shots outside the cut mark, Javier learned quickly not to doubt his capacity for invention.

“At the fourth in the second round, he hit a very bad three-wood to the left, very short. He pitched out and had about 50 yards to the flag, with a little pot bunker in the way. I said to him, ‘Just leave it close enough the hole.’ He chipped it to 12 inches away. I thought, ‘OK, I will never say anything like that again.’”

Few images encapsulate Ballesteros in full flight quite like the one Cannon captured of him at the 1988 Open at Royal Lytham, as he unleashed a long iron at the 15th into a gathering gale. You can tell it was taken 33 years ago, in that there is not a sponsored visor in sight, leaving the Spaniard’s shock of black hair blowing in the wind.

“This is one of my favourites of all David’s photos,” Javier says. “You see all the power and the charisma.” Even the bright-green trousers seem perfectly attuned to both the era and the personality of the man modelling them.

Ballesteros was at his golfing apex that week, winning his third Claret Jug and his second on the Lancashire links. “The Open was his favourite tournament and it’s also mine,” Javier argues. “He loved the fact that links golf required a much more creative approach.”

There has not been a golfer since to rival the extremes of Seve’s imagination. This, after all, is the man who, en route to his first triumph at Lytham in 1979, birdied the 17th despite a drive so erratic that his ball finished underneath the bumper of a parked car. He would become known as the “car park champion”, a distinction he wore with pride.

To visit Ballesteros’ Pedrena home in 2010 was to be struck by how he had turned the place into a shrine to St Andrews. Canvases of the Auld Grey Toon were everywhere, and he disclosed that he even had a huge photograph above his bed to remind him of his Open glory there in 1984, when he sank the winning putt to defeat Tom Watson.

The moment was immortalised by Cannon’s picture of his sweeping, fist-pumping celebration, one whose outline he had mounted in bronze on his front door and tattooed on his left forearm. “That image still forms the logo of his foundation,” Javier says. “To win at the Home of Golf was his most iconic achievement.”

The connection that Ballesteros forged with the British public was, as his son recognises, among the most abiding of his life. “He loved having them around. People at the Open truly got along with my dad. I saw for myself how at home he felt in the tournament.”

As such, even when he was stricken with brain cancer, he intended to make one final pilgrimage to show his appreciation, telling me: “They want to see me, and I want to see them.” So advanced was his illness, the visit would never come to pass. But the signature Ballesteros attributes witnessed in those stills of St Andrews’ 18th green – the exuberance, the defiance, the sheer joy of living – endure long after his death.

The start of Ballesteros’ relationship with Augusta, the stage this week for a second Masters in six months, was inauspicious, in that one US TV reporter kept referring to him as “Steve”. “Steve, hey Steve, over here,” the journalist shouted on the practice green. It was a cue for him to puff out his chest, stride over, and declare: “My name is Severiano Ballesteros, and your name is…” He filled in the blank with an oath best not repeated.

While he struggled initially with the locals, he fell helplessly in love with the course, using it as a palette, as Ben Crenshaw put it, for painting the pictures in his mind.

He had won two green jackets by the time Cannon produced this frame, against the backdrop of blooming azaleas on the 13th green, in 1992. But still he harboured dissatisfaction with his Masters record.

“Dad told me that he should have won four or five times at Augusta,” Javier says. “His game was perfectly suited to the course, which forgave him for not hitting many fairways. He went there first in ’77 and felt comfortable from the second he arrived. He especially wanted to win in ’86 for his father, who had died one month before. But it was the day that Jack Nicklaus won his 18th major. It was probably the most disappointing moment of his career.”

In Masters week, Ballesteros has a loving exchange with Carmencita, as his daughter was affectionately known. “I really like this photo,” Javier smiles. “She was very special to my dad. She was the youngest, the only girl, and she was Daddy’s girl, for sure.”

Long after Seve retreated from golf, theirs remained an unbreakable bond. In 2008, they took a trip together to London to attend Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in Hyde Park.

Just four months later, Ballesteros collapsed in Madrid airport on his way to a golf exposition in Munich, the first manifestation of the cancer that was attacking his brain. He died on May 7, 2011, with his funeral drawing not just fellow emblems of European golf, from Nick Faldo to Colin Montgomerie, but the future king of Spain.

On the procession to the church of San Pedro de Pedrena, each of his children carried a three-iron, the same club he had used to perfect his craft by hitting stones on the beach.

“It has been 10 years, and it is tough not to have him here,” Javier says. “Every day I think of him, and many times I wish he was here so that I could play some golf with him, or just share some stories. He was so loved that his name would have been kept alive anyway. But I want to make sure that it happens our way.”

• Seve: His Life through the Lens is published on May 7. Preorders are available at sevethebook.com