Artist Jean Cooke (1927-2008) was not your typical gardener. Rather than cultivating nature, she let it go. She had two gardens: a tumultuous city plot in London and a clifftop meadow in Sussex. “I think she was quite a wild person in a way,” says Andrew Lambirth, the curator of a new exhibition at the Garden Museum in south London, which will bring together Cooke’s fascinating garden paintings and portraits. “Not in her behavior, but she didn’t want to be controlled.”
In 1953, she married John Bratby, who became famous for his realistic paintings of cluttered kitchen table tops. It was an abusive marriage, with Bratby only allowing Cooke to paint for three hours a day and slashing his canvases. Although respected among her fellow artists, she was little known to the public. Bratby painted her regularly, and the results were unflattering and abrupt, prompting her to claim her identity via candid self-portraits painted with a greater degree of interiority. “Her [self-portraits] aren’t flattering either,” Lambbirth says, “but she looks at herself questioningly, registering what she looked like and also how she felt.
Jean Cooke: Gardening-a reference to how she described her hobby in Who is who reference book – will include several self-portraits, one with a black eye, another cramped in an oval mirror with a handful of paintbrushes. Alongside them are rich, nuanced studies of buttercups and irises, as well as lyrical paintings of his gardens.
The 1967 painting Hortus Sicus shows several versions of her son Jason amidst a tangle of dried plants and flowers; Always celebrating (1969) depicts the artist and his three sons in a flowering meadow.
Featured for the first time in nearly 50 years, these large-scale compositions capture Cooke’s technical prowess and psychological insight even early in his career. They offer a fresh and expressive view of nature and characters that become one with the foliage. “These are also, I think, paintings of a survivor,” Lambbirth says. Cooke survived Bratby and continued to paint after they split in 1972. “She’s a real powerhouse to be reckoned with,” adds Lambbirth.
• Jean Cooke: GardeningGarden Museum, London, June 21-September 10
