Jean Cooke

Three letters from Jean Cooke signed Jean E. Bratby –  then her married name – to Ruth Borchard were all sent from Blackheath, south-east London. None is year-dated; the first, written on a postcard, is date-stamped '2 Sept 1966'. There is a wry directness to Cooke's letters. In the first, she remarks: 'on looking through my "self portraits" I find that I have 2 drawings and 3 paintings. the paintings would normally be 50 or 60gns but as I am vulnerable – "succumb to the charm of the scheme' [a reference to the phrase used to Ruth in many of her letters to artists, when requesting self-portraits] I could come down to say £30 which is £7 19s more than you suggest. They are some of the best of my self portraits. I would hang on to them but I feel like doing some more and to have too many around seems a bit too self interested.' Evidently, some haggling then went on.

In her second letter, having made a telling point about the overwhelming preponderance of male artists in Ruth's collection, Cooke agrees to compromise on price. 'Dear Miss Borchard. I am not a feminist but to have only 3 women painters out of 91 make [sic] rather poor odds so 21 gns it is. Are you going to come and pick up the painting? Yours sincerely, Jean E. Bratby.'

Jean Cooke has made some of the most original, moving and vigorously disconcerting self-portraits in modern British art, although the work has not received on the whole the serious critical attention it merits. In 'A personal word from the Artist' (for a one-person exhibition in Bradford in 1967), she wrote: 'These paintings have been done over about 15 years... There are rather a lot of self-portraits but I do not think it does any harm to know what the artist looks like. Anyway I do self portraits from time to time.' A grouping of Cooke's fiercely intimate self-portraits over the years would make a powerful exhibition.

The self-portrait in the Borchard Collection is signed 'Jean Bratby' (she married the painter John Bratby in 1953, and the marriage was dissolved in 1977), and was painted early in their marriage, around 1954 (a few years before Jean Cooke's Self-Portrait (1958) in the Tate Collection). Born in Lewisham, in south-east London in 1927, Cooke was in her late twenties when she painted it. She was over-shadowed in her earlier years by the soaring reputation of John Bratby (they and their five children appear a good deal in each other's paintings). He had a long period of successful international exhibitions, whereas she had always preferred to sell privately (valuing new collectors as potential friends), with rare commercial shows (though since becoming a Royal Academician in 1972, she exhibited regularly at the R.A. Summer Exhibition).

What one critic has called John Bratby's 'bold images, thick paint and primary colours' –formidably, often crudely, evident in his mid-to-late work, though utilised in his 1950s works with more subtle brilliancr, such as his anti-Austerity 1954 portrait of his wife Jean seated vulnerable-eyed and naked at a kitchen table that is overflowing with domestic detritus and consumerist plenty –  are in utter contrast to what the playwright Nell Dunn, in an interview with Cooke in R.A. Magazine, called the 'quite spare and lyrical quality' of Cooke's portraits. Dunn then went on to say, 'Yet, like her, they have a sense of the unpredictable.'

'Spare and lyrical' is a good description too of this oil self-portrait. Portraying a disquietingly intense female figure set against a thinishly applied, greyish background (but one with subtle spring-like colours emerging in the patterns of the chintz curtain), this work is somewhat reminiscent of Gwen John's female portraits and self-portraits (though with an expressionistic, gloomy edginess to it, a quality absent in Gwen John's work). Indeed, asked by Nell Dunn why she paints, Cooke replied: 'It is some sort of love, some sort of devotion. More nun-like than a devouring of life, but still an untiring use of eyes and mind to concoct images... A continuous delight in the thing seen.' – words that again may bring Gwen John to mind.

The spare lyricism, the untiring devotion to paint seemingly dreary everyday surroundings with a transfigured focus that exposes their raw, especial beauty, also appears to belong to a modern British tradition – looking back to Sickert as well as looking to her contemporaries, the so-called Kitchen Sink Painters of the mid-1950s who painted still lifes of the drab austerity all around them with love and clarity. In such an approach to painting quotidian reality, she also seems to be acknowledging the influence of her teachers at the Royal College of Art from 1953-55 – Carel Weight (who, she said, 'made me paint': "You draw better than anyone else!" he said'), Rodrigo Moynihan and Ruskin Spear.

But like Sickert, Weight and Spear, Cooke added another dimension to her portrayal of what is daily seen and felt. This self-portrait has some dictinctly fresh and obsessive notes within the framework of the rather cool, abstract overall composition. Acknowledging Mondrian to be 'one of my favourite painters', she admitted to the art writer and critic Andrew Lambirth –- in an interview in The Artist's & Illustrator's Magazine, April 1993 – that 'Perhaps I think in a very abstract way'. The bluish-black top or sweater, the long brown hair, the huge, staring dark eyes, the boldly outlined ruddy cheeks and very reddened, rather broad nose – all are most urgently, even ominously seen and felt, as if for the very first time. To Lambirth, Cooke confided, 'I've encouraged myself  to have a bad memory. When I wake up in the morning my mind is a complete blank... So that everything that happens from when I open my eyes is a surprise. It's like dying and coming alive again every day.'

The background to this picture pre-figures the subject matter of many of her future pictures: the wonderfully delicate painting of the flowery chintz curtains and the glimpse of neighbouring terraced houses, anticipates her painterly treatment in many later pictures of what Dunn calls her 'large rambling house with an enormous wild garden'.

Other major self-portraits by Cooke include one in the Tate, in which the artist in a patterned jumper is seen at her easel rather warily searching herself out in an oval mirror; Snow and Icons of 1975, an indoor scene in which the artist, dressed in a fur-trimmed sheepskin coat and fur hat, austerely inspects the viewer (and thus herself); Through the Looking Glass (in the collection of the late Carel Weight (q.v.) – he bequeathed this picture to the Royal Academy Collections) in which her image is barely but, once recognised, startlingly discernible in a small mirror amidst a vast profusion of flowering plants; and Le Souris or OK Mona Lisa (sic) of 1980, in which, barefoot and seated on a Victorian chair, the artist allows herself to relax somewhat into a bare smile.

In a madly titled 1997 self-portrait, Burned my Broomstick, Trashed my Whiplash, Slashed my G Gown, C'mon Darling, Fly me Down Town, the face intensely dominates the composition. The eyes are depicted as larger and more penetrating, the nose more prominent, than ever. Her ochreish and orange complexion, touched with red, appears almost like the exposed contents of a seething cauldron set against a heavy, blackish background and the artist's purplish-blackish coat. The coat's upturned collar helps to emphasise the form and emotive colour of the fiery face still further. This self-portrait is restrained and outrageous all at once. Its madcap, bewitched humour only serves to reveal the artist's sense of compassionate self-awareness. Nell Dunn's words are apposite here: 'Jean has a crazy, individual sense of humour – she sees herself as a comic character in a comic world, with the only serious thing being painting.'

Lambirth asked how she defined the beautiful. 'It's really a state of being,' she replied. 'From Goldsmith [College, the London art school where she studied in the late 1940s, where one of her tutors was the painter Bernard Meninsky (1891-1950)], we used to come back on the tram, late at night. There were these old, old people on the tram. If that day you'd been modelling a head in clay [in 1950 she went on to set up a pottery in Sussex, which she ran for three years], all these people would look beautiful, like Rembrandts. But when you hadn't been doing that they looked like ugly old drop-outs, and you'd look away. But if your mind is attuned to beauty, you find beauty in everything.'

From 1964-74, she was a lecturer in painting at the Royal College of Art. Her one-person exhibitions included shows at London's Leicester Galleries in 1964, and at Agnew's in London in 1974. She had a joint exhibition with Hans Schwarz (q.v.) at the Woodlands Art Gallery in south-west London in 1991. The small catalogue included an Introduction by Roger de Grey (q.v.), in which he related her 'painting, so evocative of the appearance of nature' to 'the realist movement of the 50s and 60s that was so much part of post-war Europe'. He described her paintings as 'stark and ungarnished, the truth is plain and sometimes painful, and only her delight in the chords and discords of nature turn drabness into invasions of delight.' For her, painting (to adapt her own words) was truly 'dying and coming alive again every day'.

As I wrote in an Obituary of the artist which appeared in the Guardian (29th August 2008), 'Such an open-hearted attitude characterises her many lyrically spare, fiercely surprising paintings, including at times wild, exploratory self-portraits, tender, unsentimental depictions of young children, deliciously fresh aspects of her riotous south London garden and airily oblique views from her studio cottage at Birling Gap in Sussex. It was in this cottage that Jean died from pneumonia, aged 81, looking out of the window to sea.

'There is a disquietingly subtle immediacy and intense sensitivity to nuances of colour in her work, which puts the viewer in mind of other notable women artists – such as Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John – who similarly had to struggle to find their own voice in the face of the formidable egos of close male artistic relatives or spouses.

'Cooke's marriage of nearly 25 years to the painter John Bratby, with whom she had three sons and a daughter, was often intimidatingly difficult. He "allowed" her to paint for only three hours in the morning, and would often freely paint over her canvases, sometimes slashing those he didn't approve of, although friends and family attest that Bratby nevertheless had an enlivening, inspiring effect on Jean as a painter.

'The marriage resulted in some of the most remarkable portrayals in modern British art: his thickly encrusted paintings of Jean as a diminutive, tentative figure amid chaotic domestic detritus, and her brilliant paintings of him as a moody, vulnerable, even fragile figure, as well as her own often harrowingly honest self-portraits. A 1958 self-portrait is in the Tate Collection.

'Born in London, Jean spent her early years living above her father's grocery shop in Lewisham. She was amazed as a child by the way her mother created beautiful colours to decorate the walls by subtly admixing odd touches of paint. In the summer of 1939, the family moved to live in a Sussex cottage (not far from Birling Gap), whose open rural vistas she found wonderfully liberating...

' Her married life to Bratby began in 1953 in a "terrible little room" in Fulham, and he insisted that she stopped making pots and resume painting. The playwright Nell Dunn later recalled first visiting the couple in 1959 in Blackheath in their "large, rambling house with an enormous wild garden to sit for ... John Bratby. At that time we were both young women with small children. She was struggling to be a painter and I to be a writer."...

'In Who's Who, Cooke gave one of her hobbies as "ungardening". Her Blackheath garden, a wilderness with a derelict swimming pool and remains of hard tennis courts split asunder by rampant weeds, inspired paradisiacal paintings with subjects such as a wide expanse of iridescent cherry blossom, moonlight illuminating the spare geometry of bare branches..., and the many doves she kept who are "so fast when they open their wings like a crucifixion". Their swiftness in flight she found "extraordinarily difficult to get right but I've somehow got to do it". The birds would often perch on her easel in the studio while she painted.

'Equally remarkable are her portraits at home, one of a baby lying tremulously in a cradle, another of her young children lolling about with exquisite ease on a comfortable, pink, antique button-backed sofa in her Blackheath drawing room, with pots of flowers still in their wrapping paper casually arrayed before them as still lifes depicted with an artful delicacy and transparency worthy of Vuillard. Her portraits of handsome young men, usually seated with hands clasped, are uncannily empathetic...