John Bratby was the enfant terrible of 1950s British Art – precocious, confrontational, full of swagger – who turned his razor-sharp eye and mordant wit on a world undepicted by many artists of the time.
“In conclusion I would say that I do not love people. In fact I may lean to misanthropy, though people fascinate me. And I’ve devoted most of my Painting Life to them. After all they are what life is about.”
Bratby mined both the simple pleasures and existential pain of domestic life, particularly the bohemian poverty in which he and his fellow ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters lived. His is an art of drabness but also of burning passion – an art of contradiction – often expressed in the paint itself, which on first glance appears prosaic, hemmed in between thick black outlines, but when seen close to, is a celebration of texture and colour and the expressive quality of brushstrokes themselves.
Born in south-west London in 1928, his early formation took place in the capital city, initially studying at Kingston College of Art before going on to attend the Royal College of Art until 1954. That same year he had his first one-man show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London. Like his contemporaries, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, Bratby’s key interest is that the objects in his painting – people, still life, flowers – have a weight and presence that is equivalent to their weight and presence in real life. It’s the everyday seen as extraordinary – essentially a Surrealist idea, with overgrown flowers as personnages, actors in our experience of the world around us.
Whilst studying at the prestigious Royal College of Art in the early 1950s, his teacher Carel Weight described him as the most talented student he had ever had. Fame came swiftly and explosively to Bratby (buoyed by the public’s fascination with rumours of his unconventional and bohemian personal life), and soon after graduation he became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy as well as the recipient of one-man exhibitions with Beaux Arts Gallery, London. In 1956 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.
In 1958, the same year the artist shared the British Guggenheim Award with Ben Nicholson, Bratby was commissioned to produce large scale paintings for the film The Horses Mouth based on Joyce Cary's novel. Alec Guinness played Gully Jimson, an eccentric figurative painter, with Guinness taking direct inspiration for the role from Bratby, who he observed at work in his studio. Guinness went on to win Best Actor at the Venice International Film Festival for his role. The present work is part of a group of paintings associated with the film and the following solo exhibition which was held in New York at The French Gallery on 987 Madison Avenue; Bratby's first in New York. It bears close similarities with the piece 'The Greenhouse', sold in Christie’s in 2020. It is on the large scale typical of this period, and features the artist’s trademark lurid colour palette, heavy impasto and focus on the textures and patterns of the urban and architectural environment; from the red terracotta floor tiles to the bricking of the terrace walls, which take compositional precedence over mother, child and dog seen receding into the left of the painting. It is perhaps no wonder he attracted the attention of a film producer, as his work has a strikingly cinematic, almost fisheye lens panoramic perspective.
Despite remaining a prolific painter (attracting the great and the good to his studio in their droves), and later also a writer, this first decade of his career arguably remains the zenith of his achievements, and it was with great pleasure that Lyon & Turnbull presented this scarce example of the period to market.
