Beryl Cook (1926-2008) was born in Reading, a lively town 40 km west of London. In her youth, Beryl was a pub owner and never studied painting. Having married a sailor, she changed many professions and places of residence. Eventually, the Cook couple settled in the port city of Plymouth, where they opened a boarding house for actors. The couple knew the many entertainment spots of the city well and enjoyed spending time there. And since the boarding house was filled with guests only in the summer months, Beryl was bored in the winter. And, apparently, with nothing better to do, she began to paint scenes from life, which she understood and loved. At the age of 37, she created her first painting.

As legend has it, it was a portrait of a neighbor, a large Indian woman, which Beryl painted using a box of children’s paints. All her life, Beryl Cook painted plump women smoking a cigar or a very fat cigarette, and well-fed men who were not inferior to their companions either in size or in their readiness to bare themselves in public. The subjects of her caricatured images were, as a rule, ordinary local residents, often encountered on the streets of provincial British towns. The artist captured scenes on a bus, a shop, a park, at a market, in a pub, caught her characters playing poker – and playing musical instruments, at slot machines and in strip bars…

According to the art critic of the London newspaper “Evening Standard”, Beryl Cook is the most remarkable thing that has happened to British painting in many years: she has a frankness that painting seems to have lost in the process of “modernization”.

And the Antiques and Art Monitor magazine writes: “Among the self-taught artists of Great Britain, Beryl Cook is almost the only one whose works are imbued with a fantastic sense of humour, which is understandable to each of us, and a charming tactlessness that conceals a truly sophisticated wit.”