Peter Coker

There is one letter from Peter Coker to Ruth Borchard, dated 6th July 1966, sent from The Red House, Mistley, Manningtree, Essex:

Some time ago you wrote to me asking if I had a self portrait for sale, as you intend to publish a book on Contemporary British Self Portraits. I have over the years painted myself a number of times but have always for one reason or another destroyed them. Quite recently however I have painted one, with which I am reasonably pleased and would be willing to let you have it for £15 if you are interested. Size 15" x 15". I will sign and batten it and send it to you through the post when I hear from you. The idea of a book of this kind is a very good one and I hope it gets published.

Born in London in 1926, Peter Coker would have been forty years old a few weeks after he wrote to Ruth. The standing figure of the artist, three quarters accommodated by the small board's vertical format, is rendered in stark relief against the painted white background. A rigorous yet sensitive black outline delineates both man and garments, empathetically establishing his presence against a bright backdrop of pure (if slightly scumbled) nothingness. In his whiteish apron and reddish checked shirt, Coker looks workmanlike, artisanal, down-to-earth. There are no redundant brushstrokes, no straining after prettiness of effect. And yet the realism here is far from photographic. The red stripes and checks of the shirt are painted with plain abandon, and the apron's intermingling white and muted green and brown brushstrokes (when abstracted from the rest of the picture) appear almost like a low-pitched expressionist landscape-cum-seascape – thus perhaps unconsciously bringing to mind the artist's love of landscape, his main subject as a painter in later years.

His face at a slight angle, the artist looks directly at us, at his mirrored reflection. Though his posture is quite relaxed – one hand resting in the apron pocket – the still-youthful face has a somewhat edgy and wary look, accentuated by the furrowed brow, the slight curl of the lips, and, above all, an imponderable sadness, a wounded look even, around the eyes. On close scrutiny, the painting of the face is richly nuanced and textured – again, when abstracted from the rest of the picture, itself forming a kind of weather beaten landscape – yet the overall effectis less of ruggedness than of the tactile immediacy of firm but quite delicate features. The strong contrasts of lights and darks in the picture – the left side of his face and body illumined, the right side darkened – can be seen as having a psychological andspiritual quality, demarcating perhaps both the 'shadow' sides and more enlightened aspects of the artist's character and identity.

Coker's self-portraits have been few and far between. A small self-portrait was illustrated in a 'profile' of the artist in Arts Review (February 26th, 1972), accompanied by the observations of Michael Webber: 'His Self-Portrait shows many of his qualities, as well as being a very good likeness. It is intense, dedicated, powerfully lit, the brushwork direct, free and confident.' A small drypoint Self-Portrait (1970; Collection: National Portrait Gallery, London) shows the artist intensely scrutinising himself (in the unseen mirror), seated at a table, as he works at the etching. The contrast between the luminosity of his features (on one side of his face) and fingers (the lucid white of the paper revealing itself here), and his black, sweatered torso and trousers, and thick mop of dark hair, gives this print an austere urgency all of its own.

Coker's passionately impersonal Self-Portrait (In Studio Mirror) (oil on canvas; 1988; Collection: Royal Academy of Arts, London; gift from Vera Coker, 2008) – one of a series of six self-portrait studies, entitled Le Peintre au Travail (based on a Seurat drawing of the same name in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) – has an expressionistic freedom in its brushwork. The artist's face is rendered featureless in swathes of flesh-like red, green and yellow strokes, the chin and top of the clearly grey-haired head given a sturdy black outline. Wearing a black top or sweater, this strongly conceived figure is depicted before what appears to be a stark, white-edged and formidably black-backed canvas. He appears to be standing on an ochre-coloured ground (or perhaps studio carpet), and the reflected background seems to be that of nature through the window – a generous expanse of greenery or grass. Though picturing himself at work in his studio, it is as though the artist sees himself simultaneously en plein air – immersed, as it were, within a key landscape terrain of his art.

In the 1950s, Coker painted a number of highly perceptive portraits, including one of his wife Vera's cousin Alban 'Tubby' Webb (1951) – a hefty, sensitive-looking man, resolutely outlined here, with burnished, muscular flesh set against dark tones; one of John Jacobs (1952) – a sombre study of a man, a friend of Peter's father (a picture rather like a cross between portraits by Soutine and Sickert), with, literally, a gleam in his eye; and Peter's five-year old son Nicholas Asleep (1957), his slight form resting on an extensive sheet, forming a backdrop whose tonality modulates exquisitely from lilac to deep purple.

In 1951, Coker was asked to paint Percy Hague Jowett (1882-1955), painter and the past principal of the Royal College of Art; in the second version of this portrait (1954), this rather gaunt, apparently shy and retiring figure is depicted facing the viewer with disquieting directness in a judiciously constructed, freshly handled composition. The artist considered this and the portrait of Geraldine (c.1952), a girl of six or seven years old, daughter of a woman who looked after Nicholas while Vera was at work – in which the subject gazes at the viewer with an absorbing openness – his most significant portraits. Coker's pen and chalk drawing of his friend, the painter John Nash (c.1979), with whom he made painting trips toYorkshire and the Isle of Skye, is a scrupulously objective yet lovingly respectful study of both the physical wearing-down and (in this case) uncowed self-assurance of old age; this work is in the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

Coker's pencil drawing of Vera and Nicholas Coker (1959 or 1960; Collection: National Portrait Gallery), showing his wife and young son seated at a table with a checked cloth (the boy appears to be drawing on a sheet of white paper) is notable for the tense poise of the subjects in an informal domestic setting evoked through a subtly expressive use of line andshading. His 1970 etching and aquatint of his eighteen-year old son Nicholas Coker (1970; Collection: National Portrait Gallery), a close up view of his head inintrospective mien, with an abundance of dark hair, is at once a fine, objective and warmly intimate study of sensitive, late adolescent character and appearance.

Peter Coker was born in London, the son of a father who worked in theconfectionary business and a mother who appreciated the arts; as Frances Spalding wrote in her Obituary of the artist in the Independent (20th December 2004), the family moved to 'Leytonstone [in north-east London], soon after Peter was born. Among his childhood memories was the experience of his maternal grandfather's engraving workshop, where the array of tools and materials and the purposeful atmosphere awoke him to the dignity and pleasure of craftsmanship.

'On leaving school, he initially worked under his father as an assistant at Kerland and Haskin, the confectioners. He hated it and soon moved on, becoming a studio assistant at Odhams Press in Long Acre where he was encouraged to attend St Martin's School of Art, first in the evenings and at weekends and then on a day-release scheme.'

In 1943, aged seventeen, Coker volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm, training as an electrician, later moving to the Education Corps, teaching arts and crafts. Demobbed in late 1946, he became a full-time student at St Martin's from 1947 until 1950, travelling around France and Italy for three months in 1949. He found himself especially moved by the fresco of The Last Supper (1520-25) by Andrea del Sarto, which was painted in the old refectory of the 16th century Vallombrosian monasteryof San Salvi in Florence – a fresco renowned for remarkable spatial effects and a subtle sense of movement flowing between its most humanely and gracefully observed figures.

In Paris, Coker was greatly inspired by Gustave Courbet's social realism in classic paintings such as A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), which impressed him with its audacity of scale and vision and, as in Courbet's paintings of the cliffside formations at Étretat, a quite radically sculptural definition of volume and form.

From 1950-54, he studied at the Royal College of Art, where (in the painter Frederick Gore's words, from a 1972 exhibition catalogue) 'Peter worked largely on his own – almost entirely on still-life and occasionally heads. Ruskin Spear, Rodrigo Moynihan and Robert Buhler were his strongest contacts on the staff.' In 1947 Peter met Vera Crook, then a mathematics undergraduate, in a queue for a ballet in central London (he was an aficionado of ballets and classic plays at the time); the couple went on to marry in 1951.

From St Martin's, Coker had gone on to the Royal College with the painter Jack Smith. As Gore has written: 'Edward Middleditch [was] senior and scarcely known to him, John Bratby a nodding acquaintance.' He also overlapped with the painter Derrick Graves. Following his first one-man show at Zwemmer's Gallery in London in 1956 – the first of a few shows there which contained paintings based on drawings made in a butcher's shop in Leytonstone – Coker became associated with the other so-called 'Kitchen Sink' painters, Bratby, Greaves, Middleditch and Smith. In 1955 Bratby had painted several raw paintings of backyard toilets; in 1952 Middleditch had painted Butcher Meat Porter Carrying a Carcass; at the same time Jack Smith was painting sparse, at once tender and minatory scenes of babies and children at home, and unadorned tables cluttered with domestic detritus. It was in December 1954, writing in Encounter magazine, that the art critic and writer David Sylvester observed that this 'post-war generation takes us back from the studio to the kitchen. Dead ducks, rabbits and fish – especially skate – can be found there, as in the expressionist slaughterhouse.' 

This contemporary kitchen contains 'the usual plain furniture, and even the baby's nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchensink? The kitchen sink too.' Current painters had abandoned the self-consciously arty studio for 'a very ordinary kitchen, lived in by a very ordinary family'. The tone of their work – though partly rejoicing in the commonplace (fulfilling Cézanne's injunction 'Copy your stovepipe', as Sylvester notes, and 'dealing joyously with gross material facts', as Sickert had recommended to artists in a 1910 essay) – also reflected the austere, desiccated, bare-milk-bottle-on-scrubbed-wooden-table mood of a post-war Britain increasingly stripped bare of chintzy drawing-room fabrics and, more to the point, drawing-room pretensions and theatrics.

Coker's powerful painting Table and Chair (oil on board, 1955, Collection: Tate) is a quintessential 'Kitchen Sink School' painting, down to the rough-planked, somewhat vertiginously tilted table supporting a half-filled milk bottle, a metal colander, a pudding basin, some bulbs of garlic, cooking apples, and a flayed sheep's head resting on sheets of newspaper. A little boy (based on the artist's drawings of his son Nicholas's head), with one hand perched on the table, another resting on a chair, is seen staring at the severed, bloody animal head. The boy's expression is one seemingly compounded of innocence, curiosity and a certain disorientated alarm at the terrifying unknown. The conjunction of animal head and half bottle of milk – objects symbolic of death and nurturing, rendered with such precise care and poeticmatter-of-factness – makes Coker's view of this at once childlike (on the boy's part) and deeply considered (on the artist's part) meditation on facts of life and death evenmore strangely touching and compelling.

In his 2002 essay, 'Town and Country – Fatal Englishman: Memories of Nicholas Coker', Richard Humphreys, then a Senior Curator at Tate Britain, wrote of Table and Chair: 'though this is a measured piece of very fine and sophisticated painting about the facts of life and looking, it also has a remarkable edgy,contradictory energy – the sheep's head seems to look at you as if emerging still-born out of contemporary events; a fully alive three-year old boy stares up enquiringly and tentatively as if posing a question; the open door compresses thespace and gives the sense of a very particular moment. The image is apparently full of unspoken or unknown implications, suggesting a mute drama. And one culinary thought I still have is what on earth do you do with a sheep's head for lunch?'

Nicholas Coker (1952-1985) had become an art historian, specialising in seventeenth-century English art, and went on to write catalogue essays for three of his father’s exhibitions, including Paintings and Drawings of the Butcher’s Shop (1979).

Another 1955 oil painting by Coker, also in the Tate Collection, Man Carrying Pig (set in the Leytonstone butcher's shop) shows a man in a white coat, balancing on his shoulder the suspended pig carcass, as he moves it along via a metallic pulley device. The clinical white background serves to accentuate the rigorously rendered materiality of the man and his burden of dead meat, portrayed in staccato measures with palette knife-applied impasto (which surely owes something to the contemporary influence of the French semi-abstract painter Nicolas de Staël). Though clearly in the tradition of Rembrandt and Soutine who depicted animal carcasses, Coker's pictures of dead animals carry disturbing, specifically modern resonances (the picture was painted only a decade after the end of the War).

The butcher's professional stoicism under the burden of decomposing flesh – the weight of mortality hanging heavily on his shoulders – may perhaps arouse our admiration. Yet his dedicated though impersonal artisanship is pictured along with details of unflinching bestial realism set against a clinical backdrop (the parallel with some of Francis Bacon's visceral contemporaneous paintings is clear). The painting finds sinister echoes in the widespread literary and artistic 1950s notion of recent history being the history of the slaughterhouse.

Writing of Coker's paintings Butcher's Shop I and Butcher's Shop II (both 1955) – pictures which exclude the figure of the butcher himself and focuson the tools and accoutrements of the butcher's trade – Nicholas Coker perceptively noted that 'The reality of the carcase in Butcher's Shop I is in the weight of the form in the thickness of the paint. The visual puns in Butcher's Shop II of weights and carcase seem to make that point.'

Writing in his biography of the artist, Peter Coker RA (published by Chris Beetles Ltd, London, 2002, with contributions by John Russell Taylor and Richard Humphries), David Wooton noted that, after the artist had graduated from the Royal College, 'the novel motifs that Peter introduced habitually comprised fish and meat [...] At first he concentrated on 'fishes and patterns of newspapers on scrubbed table tops' (Gore 1973), producing drawings in conté, and completing an oil – Fish and Newspaper – towards the end of 1954. In describing this work [...] Nicholas Coker highlighted texture as well as structure [...]

‘The table top is parallel to the picture plane and the freedom of design that this facilitates is expressed in a very formal composition. Newspaper being flat in section breaks up the grain of the table. A second viewpoint is introduced to clarify the form of the fish and cup. The emphasis on texture relates as much to developing interest in paint itself as to a desire to keep the eye on the surface. (N Coker 1979).'’

Coker painted many landscapes over the years – at Epping Forest (the ancient woodlands straddling the border between Greater London and Essex) from 1956-59 (in which, according to the catalogue text for the Chris Beetles Gallery 'Summer Show 2002', 'he revived the spirit of Barbizon'); in France from 1955 to 1989; and around the Scottish Isles from 1970 to 1992. In an article in the East Anglian Daily Times (February 5th 1986) – marking the acquisition of six works by Coker for The Ipswich Museums and Galleries Collection – Cathy Brown wrote about Coker's landscape and plant studies, and also quoted from the artist, who lived for a good part of his life in East Anglia: 'For the landscapes, and equally interpretive close-up studies of plants which interest him nowadays, Peter Coker works out of doors, "doing lots of studies, drawings and watercolours, bringing them back into the studio,” and working on the paintings there. His favourite subjects are French, the "absolutely extraordinary cliffs" at Étretat, painted by Monet, Matisse and Courbet before him, and Bargemon [the medieval village in the Var region ofProvence] in the south, "a terrific source of material". But he also likes East Anglian subjects. "The landscape is just as good, and the light is quite extraordinary." He has painted the [river] Stour, the forests at Tunstall and Rendlesham, and especially, Aldeburgh [...] "We went at Christmas. Boxing Day was amazing. The sea was quiteterrific. I spent all day working from the window. It was extraordinarily colourful, the brown sea, the grey sky."'

In 1959, Coker painted a series of vividly impastoed paintings of thickets of trees, bare, dark (but in fact multi-coloured, containing subtle components of black, green, yellow, sometimes even light blue and white), slender trunks thrusting out of snowy or moss-covered ground or out of crevices scintillating with winter sunlight. Paintings of salmon nets drying at Achiltibuie in Scotland, made in the late 1980s, are similarly endowed with a muscular if, in this case, sparser sense of structure combined with a dynamic painterly asperity. In Peat Landscape, Achiltibuie (1988), each fresh, broad brushstroke and the muted colours in keeping with the northern light, show the artist intuitively identifying with elements of grass, heather, peat, water, clouds, and blue sky. St-Valéry-en-Caux – the title of a 1991 oil painting of an enclosed harbour with a white house, white yacht sail and white building (all boldly outlined in grey and black) on the horizon – is characteristic of much of his work in its subdued yet still resonant colour and its paring down of figurative form to abstract essentials.

Peter Coker was elected as an Associate to the Royal Academy in 1965 and made a Royal Academician in 1972, the year of his touring retrospective organised by the Minories, Colchester. There were retrospectives of drawings and sketchbooks at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 1989, and of paintings and drawings at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal in 1992. In 2001 he and Vera went to Bologna to visit the Morandi house and museum at the invitation of the curator. In 2002, after a gap of ten years, Coker began to paint again, producing the Parisian Suite of etchings and paintings of Paris in nine months. The same year, the Chris Beetles Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of his work from 1954 to 1992. In late 2004, Peter Coker R. A. A Juxtaposition, with an essay by Andrew Lambirth, was published to accompany an exhibition at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield of the Parisian works together witha selection of early paintings. Peter Coker died on 16th December 2004. In 2005 there was a memorial display of his works at Tate Britain, and an exhibition of his paintings at Piano Nobile Fine Paintings, London.

Frederick Gore characterised the artist thus: 'Coker is a stoic whose personality conceals his sensitivity to suffering and he has had his own share of it. The sensitivity of his painting secretly reveals the depths of his feelings.' The tragically untimely death of his son Nicholas on 22nd March 1985, had a devastating effect on him.

David Wootton, who knew Coker during the last six years of his life, wrote (as an addendum to an Obituary of the artist by Michael McNay in the Guardian on the 22nd December 2004): 'That Peter returned to painting at the end of his life willsurprise no one who knew him. The disability that resulted from his heart attacks and strokes [in 1990] extinguished neither his spirit nor his determination to express himself. He remained completely dedicated to his art, practising it whenever possible and, at other times, studying its history, theory and technique. A glimpse into the first floor studio of his Essex house revealed  that  he  approached  his  art  in  a  practical,  extremely professional way. He developed a thorough knowledge of each skill, and ensured that tools and materials were always at hand and ready for use. This orderliness may seem at odds with his intense visual language; however, its security gave him the freedom to communicate the immediacy, the vitality of many specific terrains, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Mediterranean coast.