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<\/p>\nNo 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 \u2014 Bosom Pals \u2014 on her characters, and Victoria Wood called her \u201cRubens with jokes\u201d. Her images, among the most recognisable in this country, crop up pretty much everywhere except in museums. \u201cNot that she would have minded,\u201d says her daughter-in-law, Teresa Cook. \u201cBeryl didn\u2019t care a jot about establishment recognition.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 f\u00eated not only as one of our best loved contemporaries, but also as a keen-sighted chronicler of her age.<\/p>\n
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Back Bar of the Lockyer Tavern<\/p>\n
COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM \u00a9 JOHN COOK 2025<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to see why the highbrows might have been a bit snooty. Cook\u2019s 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\u2019t much like laughter. But undoubtedly it\u2019s the humour that makes Cook\u2019s works so widely popular; that and the fact that \u201cordinary people aren\u2019t painted that much\u201d, Teresa says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019ve heard again and again,\u201d says the Box\u2019s curator, Terah Walkup, \u201cis 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 \u2014 people who might be looked down on in a culture of body shaming, but here they are having the time of their life.\u201d Cook\u2019s subjects are always so quintessentially, so unselfconsciously, so irrepressibly themselves.<\/p>\n
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Beryl Cook in 1996<\/p>\n
MIKE DAINES\/SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL<\/p>\n
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\u2019t like it. She was appalled by apartheid. \u201cShe was never prejudiced,\u201d says Teresa, who is married to Beryl\u2019s son, John, a retired carpenter and builder. \u201cBesides, she didn\u2019t much like the expat life, all the partying and heavy drinking and wife swapping.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt was a rather odd subject to choose,\u201d observes Teresa, not least because it was called Hangover.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The best art, music and cultural events this week \u2014 the critics\u2019 guide<\/a><\/p>\n On returning to England, first to Looe in Cornwall and then to Plymouth \u2014 where she became a boarding-house landlady \u2014she 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. \u201cIt was just a hobby,\u201d Teresa explains. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t famous when I first met her and married her son. She just loved painting.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 it was a lively depiction of a gay bar in Plymouth \u201cdone at a time when gay people found it difficult to be out in public\u201d, Teresa says. \u201cBut Beryl had so many gay friends.\u201d Her paintings cost \u00a330 or \u00a340 then. Now they sell at auction for tens of thousands. She is collected by, among others, Joan Collins, Whoopi Goldberg and Yoko Ono.<\/p>\n Lockyer Street Tavern on the cover of The Sunday Times Magazine<\/p>\n Cook\u2019s work is now ubiquitous, but she was notoriously reticent. \u201cShe was terribly shy,\u201d says Sophie, her granddaughter, 42. \u201cShe always said she was boring and bourgeois. \u2018No one wants to know about me,\u2019 she would say.\u201d She hated doing interviews and, on the rare occasions that she did, would drink a stiff vodka beforehand to calm her nerves.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople expected someone wearing leopard print and stilettos; someone living life out loud,\u201d 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. \u201cOne of them fell down a step,\u201d Sophie remembers. \u201cIt cracked its shell and it had to be mended with super glue.\u201d <\/p>\n Feeding the Tortoises<\/p>\n COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM \u00a9 JOHN COOK 2025<\/p>\n But she would use other self-portraits to fulfil her fantasies. \u201cShe 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\u2019t smoke any more she used to paint people smoking because it made her feel better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMostly, though,\u201d Teresa says, \u201cBeryl liked to remain anonymous. She didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 she was never a heavy drinker \u2014 and observe.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 The best art exhibitions to book for 2026<\/a><\/p>\n She would carry a little sketchbook and, later, a camera in her handbag to record what she saw. \u201cShe was always worried that people might not like her drawing them because her pictures are a bit of a caricature. But I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n Sailors and Seagulls<\/p>\n COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM \u00a9 JOHN COOK 2025<\/p>\n \u201cShe would grid her work, and paint it square by square, says her daughter-in-law, \u201cstarting 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It is the intense observation that lends Cook\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s a chronicler,\u201d Teresa says. Who else would record the queue for the ladies\u2019 lavatory or the work of the Dyno-Rod team with their tangle of yellow piping; the Dunkin\u2019 Donuts banner on the double decker bus; the disco moves of the 1970s; the strippagram in his thong. All the \u201ctells\u201d 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. \u201cShe\u2019ll paint a shopping centre,\u201d Walkup says, \u201c[and it makes you think,] wow, that really was when shopping centres began to change the fabric of the city, when people\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Bingo!<\/p>\n COURTESY OF WWW.OURBERYLCOOK.COM \u00a9 JOHN COOK 2025<\/p>\n 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). \u201cYou can tell what somebody is thinking in her paintings,\u201d Teresa adds. \u201cYou can see the emotions inside the person. She\u2019s very good with eyes and her particular speciality is the slantwise look.\u201d Her images tell stories. They conjure narratives.<\/p>\n \u201cCook deserves to be taken more seriously,\u201d 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\u2019t worry. The intellectuals won\u2019t 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. \u201cAll she ever wanted was for people to enjoy her pictures,\u201d Teresa says.<\/p>\n Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy is at the Box, Plymouth (theboxplymouth.com<\/a>) from Jan 24 to May 31<\/p>\n More self-taught artistsEric Tucker<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Frida Kahlo<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/5903b92a-e35c-44b8-8845-87afd9a37862.jpg\")
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