No need to go to a gallery to find the work of Beryl Cook. You are far more likely to come across it outside one: on a birthday card, a mug or a calendar, an apron or a jigsaw puzzle, a keyring or a coaster. The BBC even based an animated comedy — Bosom Pals — on her characters, and Victoria Wood called her “Rubens with jokes”. Her images, among the most recognisable in this country, crop up pretty much everywhere except in museums. “Not that she would have minded,” says her daughter-in-law, Teresa Cook. “Beryl didn’t care a jot about establishment recognition.” She says Cook, who died at the age of 81 in 2008, would be delighted to know that, rather than growing dusty in storage, her paintings were out there in the world bringing laughter and joy.
Establishment attitudes are changing, however. This year marks the centenary of the birth of the seaside landlady turned self-taught painter who spent the last 40 years of her life in Plymouth. In celebration, her hometown is staging a landmark retrospective in its public gallery the Box. Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy brings together about eighty (almost all of them borrowed from private collections) of the more than 500 pictures that she painted as well as some pretty odd archival material (who else would treasure a mannequin advertising posture belts for men?). It offers an opportunity to reassess the work of an artist fêted not only as one of our best loved contemporaries, but also as a keen-sighted chronicler of her age.
Back Bar of the Lockyer Tavern
COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM © JOHN COOK 2025
It’s easy to see why the highbrows might have been a bit snooty. Cook’s pictures are about as discreet as a drunken hen party on the Hoe. Whooping troupes of fat ladies burst forth in bright colour. They cavort across canvases with rambunctious abandon. They hitch up tight party frocks and flash frilly knickers. They wobble their bosoms and bawl Knees Up Mother Brown. Perhaps art historians don’t much like laughter. But undoubtedly it’s the humour that makes Cook’s works so widely popular; that and the fact that “ordinary people aren’t painted that much”, Teresa says.
“What I’ve heard again and again,” says the Box’s curator, Terah Walkup, “is that she paints people like me, and not just people like me, but people like me having fun. She paints older women, curvy women, LGBTQ people — people who might be looked down on in a culture of body shaming, but here they are having the time of their life.” Cook’s subjects are always so quintessentially, so unselfconsciously, so irrepressibly themselves.
Beryl Cook in 1996
MIKE DAINES/SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
Cook, who was born in Egham in Surrey, was one of four sisters and was brought up by her mother and grandfather. She never met her father. After leaving school at the age of 15, she took a secretarial course. She married her childhood neighbour in 1948 and they moved to what was then Rhodesia. Cook didn’t like it. She was appalled by apartheid. “She was never prejudiced,” says Teresa, who is married to Beryl’s son, John, a retired carpenter and builder. “Besides, she didn’t much like the expat life, all the partying and heavy drinking and wife swapping.”
It was while Cook was there, however, that she discovered her talent, when she and her young son competed to copy a picture-postcard of a topless woman. “It was a rather odd subject to choose,” observes Teresa, not least because it was called Hangover.
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On returning to England, first to Looe in Cornwall and then to Plymouth — where she became a boarding-house landlady —she began painting more. She had turned 40. All summer she was busy with guests, but in the quiet winter months she would pick up her brushes. “It was just a hobby,” Teresa explains. “She wasn’t famous when I first met her and married her son. She just loved painting.”
Over the years, her work began to fill the house: hanging on the walls and stacked in her tiny ironing room. A lodging actress admired them and brought them to the attention of Bernard Samuels, the director of the Plymouth Arts Centre who, after several telephone calls, persuaded the reluctant Cook to exhibit. Her first show, in 1976, kicked off her career thanks in part to The Sunday Times Magazine, which put her Lockyer Street Tavern on its cover — it was a lively depiction of a gay bar in Plymouth “done at a time when gay people found it difficult to be out in public”, Teresa says. “But Beryl had so many gay friends.” Her paintings cost £30 or £40 then. Now they sell at auction for tens of thousands. She is collected by, among others, Joan Collins, Whoopi Goldberg and Yoko Ono.
Lockyer Street Tavern on the cover of The Sunday Times Magazine
Cook’s work is now ubiquitous, but she was notoriously reticent. “She was terribly shy,” says Sophie, her granddaughter, 42. “She always said she was boring and bourgeois. ‘No one wants to know about me,’ she would say.” She hated doing interviews and, on the rare occasions that she did, would drink a stiff vodka beforehand to calm her nerves.
“People expected someone wearing leopard print and stilettos; someone living life out loud,” Walkup says. But the real Beryl Cook is the one with jeans and a bowl haircut, specs and flat shoes. You can see her in some of her self-portraits, like the one in which she crouches down in the garden to feed her pair of pet tortoises. “One of them fell down a step,” Sophie remembers. “It cracked its shell and it had to be mended with super glue.”
Feeding the Tortoises
COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM © JOHN COOK 2025
But she would use other self-portraits to fulfil her fantasies. “She paints herself doing the sort of things that she would have loved to do: dressing in leather or dancing nude tango with my grandad, or being an American cheerleader with pom-poms. She loved to smoke Silk Cut. And when she couldn’t smoke any more she used to paint people smoking because it made her feel better.”
“Mostly, though,” Teresa says, “Beryl liked to remain anonymous. She didn’t want to be recognised when she was out and about. She would sit quietly in a corner with a lager or a gin and tonic — she was never a heavy drinker — and observe.”
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She would carry a little sketchbook and, later, a camera in her handbag to record what she saw. “She was always worried that people might not like her drawing them because her pictures are a bit of a caricature. But I don’t think they did mind. I never minded myself. Though I do remember feeling a bit uncomfortable once, before she started painting me. I was sitting across the table and she was looking at me, really looking hard.”
Cook is not a great artist in any traditional painterly sense. She does not probe passionate depths, explore urban dystopias or take spiritual flights. She loved Stanley Spencer, and at the beginning, apparently, thought she might imitate him, but realised that she lacked his metaphysical touch. Edward Burra’s sleazy cafes and nightclubs and gay bars were also an influence. But unlike Burra, she showed nothing sinister in her world. She was far from painterly.
Sailors and Seagulls
COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM © JOHN COOK 2025
“She would grid her work, and paint it square by square, says her daughter-in-law, “starting with the background first because she loved the foreground and it was something to look forward to. She took a fortnight to do each of them: a week to plan them out; a week to colour them in, she used to say.”
It is the intense observation that lends Cook’s pictures their air of quirky authenticity. She noticed every telling detail: the way a man puts his thumbs in his braces or takes his false teeth out to examine them at the bar; the concentration of the hairdresser as she dyes a client’s roots blonde; the pursed disbelief of the woman who has just lost at bingo; the protective curl of a hand round a pint. Nothing is too insignificant for Cook’s attention.
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“She’s a chronicler,” Teresa says. Who else would record the queue for the ladies’ lavatory or the work of the Dyno-Rod team with their tangle of yellow piping; the Dunkin’ Donuts banner on the double decker bus; the disco moves of the 1970s; the strippagram in his thong. All the “tells” of her era can be found in her pictures: the string vests and white stilettos, the fishnets and Formica, the leopard-prints and hotpants, the Little Chef uniforms and full English breakfasts, the crowded car boot sale and kiss-me-quick sailor hat. “She’ll paint a shopping centre,” Walkup says, “[and it makes you think,] wow, that really was when shopping centres began to change the fabric of the city, when people’s shopping habits changed. Or you will see an ashtray full of butts and remember back to a time when people still smoked in pubs. She captures a period. Historians will be able to reconstruct a picture of our society from her works.”
Bingo!
COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM © JOHN COOK 2025
Further to that, she captures the absurdities of human behaviour and through them, perhaps, a sense of our frailty. The outer accoutrements reflect the inner person. She captures our public and secret selves, declared her loyal supporter the critic Edward Lucie-Smith (he appears, a plump nude, in one of her paintings, lounging in the garden, a crown of laurels on his head). “You can tell what somebody is thinking in her paintings,” Teresa adds. “You can see the emotions inside the person. She’s very good with eyes and her particular speciality is the slantwise look.” Her images tell stories. They conjure narratives.
“Cook deserves to be taken more seriously,” wrote Julian Spalding, another critic and admirer. Her infectious enthusiasm, bursting out of her paintings like a stripper from a cake, has already made her incredibly popular with the public. Might this retrospective bring her proper recognition in academic circles? It certainly should. But don’t worry. The intellectuals won’t take over. The crowds who pitch up to this free exhibition will still find all sorts of Beryl Cookware in the shop to take home and revel in. And that would be as Cook wished. “All she ever wanted was for people to enjoy her pictures,” Teresa says.
Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy is at the Box, Plymouth (theboxplymouth.com) from Jan 24 to May 31
More self-taught artistsEric Tucker
He lived in a council house in Warrington, left school at 14, worked as a gravedigger and as a boxer and used Sellotape to repair his car windows, but when he died in 2018 his brother and nephew found out he had a secret life. To their surprise, in his attic was a stash of incredible paintings that are now celebrated.
Frida Kahlo
The painter, who has a retrospective at Tate Modern this year (June 25 to January 3, 2027), taught herself to paint while recovering from a devastating bus accident in 1925.
Vincent van Gogh
His work is taught at art schools, but he learnt to paint by relying on manuals and copying the old masters.
Sophie Calle
The photographer, conceptual artist and writer did not to go to art school, but taught herself while travelling and taking jobs such as a hotel maid.
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