1965
John Bratby's vividly squalid renderings of domestic interiors featuring Corn Flakes packets and toilet rolls electrified the British realist tradition and suggested Pop Art ten years before it happened
Kingston College of Art
Royal College of Art
Kingston College of Art
Royal College of Art
Tiffin Boys' School, Kingston
This portrait, painted for the Royal Academy’s 1973 Summer Exhibition, shows the Queen with a black eye and an owl perched on her head, surrounded by the other members of her family, with the artist himself lurking behind them on the canvas. Critics have dubbed it the worst-ever portrait of the Royals
For the last 20 years of his life, his second wife Patti – they’d married in 1974 – was the focus of Bratby’s sexual obsession. Increasingly, he sought to control her life
John Bratby was born on July 19, 1928, into the family of George Alfred and Lily Beryl (Randall) Bratby. His childhood was chaotic and unhappy, and he took refuge in various schooltime enterprises: profitably reselling buns in break, writing pornographic stories which he charged for the reading of, and training himself to be a professional boxer.
Between 1949 and 1950 Bratby studied art at Kingston College of Art. Although John was accepted at the Slade School of Fine Art, Bratby attended the Royal College of Art in 1951 – 1954. It was during these college years that the Bratby myth began to coalesce. He was impoverished, and would beg or sleep rough in Hyde Park or stow away in the attics of the Royal College. His art seemed to match his wild reputation.
Some stability was brought into John's life in 1953 when he met and married his fellow student Jean Cooke, then a sculptor and potter. The next year Bratby was given his first one-man exhibition, at the age of 26, at the celebrated Beaux Arts Gallery. His professional career was launched with this success, followed by the first prize in the John Moores Junior Section in 1959, and Guggenheim Awards for 1956, 1957, and 1958. In 1954 he first exhibited at the Royal Academy, to which he was elected an Associate in 1959 and a full member in 1971.
From the start, Bratby excited press attention. When his dour, tough, impolite realism broke over the art world like a wave of dirty dish-water, the shock may have been salutary, but the response was disproportionate. In 1954, John Russell, then art critic of the Sunday Times, favorably compared Bratby's rendition of a cornflake-packet with Velazquez's "Rokeby Venus", and Studio Magazine classed Bratby with Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet, and Manet. Bratby became an international name almost overnight, and the first artist media pop-star, several years before Hockney. In 1956, Bratby and the other so-called Kitchen Sink painters - Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith and Derrick Greaves - were chosen to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. That year, one of Bratby's finest early works, "Still-Life with Chip Frier", was purchased by the Tate.
The Fifties were undoubtedly Bratby's best period. In 1957 he was commissioned to paint the pictures for the film of Joyce Cary's novel "The Horse's Mouth" and became identified in the popular imagination with its Bohemian artist hero, Gulley Jimson. In art schools he became a kind of folk idol who was seen to be vigorously demolishing the old order. Bratby's paintings, including several huge figure compositions on hardboard, were shown in the United States, and he could afford to buy a large house in Blackheath. Then in 1960, he was dropped, as he said, 'like a cold potato.'
Fashions changed, and abstraction, soon to be followed by Pop Art, ousted Kitchen Sink. The critics reversed their judgments - Berger accused Bratby of selling out to materialism - poured scorn on or ignored his work. The situation remained much the same until last years, when a major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, a reassessment of the Kitchen Sink Painters at the Mayor Gallery and an exhibition of his new work at the Albemarle Gallery, London, brought Bratby back into the critical limelight.
Bratby was a driven man, always painting. His recreation was to do a bit of drawing, or, in the Sixties, to write compellingly lurid autobiographical novels: "Breakdown" (1960), "Breakfast and Elevenses" (1961), "Brake-Pedal Down" (1962), and "Break 50 Kill" (1963). His rare leisure activities of that period consisted of squash, snooker, and buying fine cars. Then the menopause came in 1970 and it was fireworks day, every day. He left the second womb of his life, that of marital somnambulance, crashed cars, lived the high life, drank, and loved young ladies.
The same year also brought a change in palette as Bratby studied the bright contrasts and color patches of the Fauves and Nabis, in rebellion against Sickertian tonality. Yet it was always to Sickert that Bratby returned for inspiration and guidance. Despite his attraction to the expressionism of Van Gogh, and his cherished but unsubstantiated belief in his own Jewishness (thus linking him more directly to painters he admired like Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka), Bratby was a very English painter, curiously close to the all-inclusive vision of the Pre-Raphaelites.
His marriage to Jean Cooke was dissolved in 1977 and, after he met Patti Prime, an actress, through a Lonely Hearts column, they married that same year. That brought Bratby great happiness and the wish to celebrate, which fructified his art and changed his existence. Travel became the inspiration for much of his later work. From an extraordinary house with a cupola in Hastings, the Bratbys would sally forth to London, Istanbul, Paris or Venice.
In the Seventies and Eighties, he undertook a massive series of portraits, a "Gallery of Individuals", which finally numbered over 1,500 pictures. The enterprise was far more ambitious than it was successful, though Bratby could be a penetrating portrait-painter, as can be seen in his "Billie Whitelaw" of 1967. Bratby should also be given his due as a precursor of Pop Art. He was, after all, the first to get excited by packaging and brand names. One horror-struck society hostess, after seeing Bratby's still-lifes, immediately had the cornflakes-packets covered in brown paper. Raw and vital, Bratby's best paintings have a life-enhancing vulgarity which transcends all questions of tastefulness. The artisr died on July 20, 1992 in Hastings, Sussex of a heart attack, leaving his widow, Patti Rosenburg.
Mural Studio at the RCA
Raymond Williams (1921–1988)
Self Portrait with Cart
Sewing Machine, Wife and Baby
Brian Aldiss
Still Life with Chip Frier
Girl in High-Backed Chair and Irises
November Sun from Revolving Studio
Jew Chew Honeydew
Jean Reading
Fishing Boat at Dungeness, 'RX67'
Washline, Little Bridge
Elaine Morgan
Dr Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903–1997)
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day
John with Two Pattis, Beauport Park, Hastings
Jean and Table Top (Girl in a Yellow Jumper)
Daffodil
Small Head of Jean (Jean Bratby, née Cooke, b.1927)
Swim Pool
Portrait of a Man
The Purple Globe Artichoke Flower
Anne
Ann, Thinking, with Flowers
Roofscape
Kitchen II
Elm Park Gardens
Table Top
Blackheath, London
Susan Ballam
The Toilet
The Artist's Ten-Year-Old Son
Jean and Still Life in front of a Window
Self Portrait
Antonia Fraser (b.1932)
Canvas Reflected in a Window
Bill Gibb 1983
Gloria the Train
Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall
Self Portrait (triptych)
Holyland
Tree Trunks and Leaves
Sir Arthur Bryan
Venice Carnival
Gloria with Angst
Irises and Tulips
Baby in a Pram in a Garden
Sunflowers and Sun-Crossed Sky in Summer
Sunflowers
Courtyard with Washing
Original Cast of the ITV Serial Drama 'Coronation Street'
The Toilet
David in the Doorway
Venice Scene and Traghetto, Italy
Gloria and David (Hot June)
Kitchen Interior
Jean Reading
The Artist's Friends
John Randall Bratby; Josephine ('Joey') Pleasence, née Crombie
Jean with a Bicycle
Kathy Wilkes, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy
Gloria with Coiled Hair
Taffy Roberts
Sunflowers
Sir John Moores (1896–1993)
Jimmy Hill
Four Amaryllis in Pots
Small Window with Hands
Sunflowers
Washbowl
Paul McCartney and Flowers
Amaryllis
Dustbins in the Studio
Sunflowers
Cyril Smith
Kitchen
Self Portrait with Sandals
Window, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath
The Artist Painting a Picture
Sailboat in the Artist's Studio
Hardy Road in November, II
Sunflowers
Bulldozing Away the Snow
A Carlisle City Councillor with Jean and David Bratby
Protracted Summer on the Water
David, in the Kitchen, with Thistle
Flowers of Summer
Self Portrait with an Easel and an Agonised Expression
Elspet Jeans, née MacGregor-Gray, Lady Rix; Brian Norman Roger Rix, Baron Rix
Sunflowers
Coach House Door
The Right Honourable Michael Foot, MP
Self Portrait with Others
Mercedes – the Artist's Car
Baby Asleep in the Garden
Caroline Bingham (1938–1998), Biographer and Historian
Jean and Dayan
Jean
The Bicycle Interior
Janet and Lilies
Self Portrait in a Mirror
Basin with Green Soap
Three People at a Table
Elm Park Gardens, I
Girl with a Rose in Her Lap
Red, Red
Flower Pots in a Greenhouse
Self Portrait
Jean and Susan
From the Coach House Window, Curtained with a 45 Star Flag
Richard Pasco (b.1926)
Thunderstorm Passed Over
Still Life with Check Table Cloth
In the Seventies, he turned to the Right, politically.
Bratby saw women primarily as sexual beings, as material for him to work on in the studio or bedroom.
Bratby was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1971.
Bratby was one of the shyest of men. His actual public appearances were very few. He was also a sex-obsessed alcoholic bully who painted psychedelic portraits of the Sixties’ biggest stars.
Quotes from others about the person
A punk painter. Uncompromised. Willing to paint as he saw it.
Bratby was married first to the painter Jean Cooke from 1953 to 1975. They had three sons one daughter together. Then he married Patti Rosenburg in 1977 and they were together until his death.
