'Gran died in terrible pain after critics slammed her 'vulgar' paintings'
Now 17 years after her death, Beryl Cook's pictures of pub life are being appreciated by a younger audience and a new exhibition celebrating the artist will give her the acclaim she deserves
Her saucy postcard-style portraits of ordinary folk having a laugh made Beryl Cook a hit with the British public.
A seaside landlady who took up painting in her 30s, the artist was a 'glamorous granny who loved a gin and tonic and a Silk Cut ciggie' and captured her larger than life characters, basking in what she called 'the joy in life'.
Whether they were necking a pint down the pub, winning at bingo, munching on a sausage sandwich, or mincing off to a hen party in a leopard print miniskirt – she painted a slice of British life, like a jolly modern Hogarth.
It took a sniffy art establishment a long time to admit that Beryl's earthy style was far more nuanced than they ever gave her credit for. But now, 17 years after her death, a landmark new exhibition at The Box in Plymouth will celebrate 100 years of Beryl in her home city.
Born before her time, the late artist's long overdue revival sees her genius being appreciated by a whole new generation. 'I really feel like there's a resurgence of love for Grandma,' says Beryl's granddaughter Sophie Cook, who runs the artist's website.
'An exhibition in London last year brought a new, younger eye to her art.
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'Grandma was celebrating the fuller figure right from the beginning. People's attitudes have changed now – but Grandma was already there doing it.'
Beryl's daughter-in-law Teresa, who has been married to Beryl's carpenter son John for 55 years, reveals a more pragmatic reason behind her voluptuous figures.
'She didn't like painting the background,' explains Teresa, 74. 'Beryl wanted the big characters, so that she could spend her time enjoying painting them and not the background!'
Perhaps this straightforward approach to painting is what made execrable art critics like the late Brian Sewell sneer. But if he thought calling it 'vulgar' was a criticism, he was wrong, because Beryl relished the vulgar and her characters' fleshy, wobbly bits.
Teresa also thinks critics didn't like her because she was funny. 'She told me, 'They said 'I haven't got a message,'' she says.
Luckily, people have finally caught up with Beryl's message of diversity.
Famously very shy and private, the artist surrounded herself with flamboyant people. 'Many of her friends were gay,' explains Teresa. 'She was totally unprejudiced about everything – she never minded other people's religions, politics, or wherever. She embraced it all. For her time, she was a free thinker.'
Despite leaving school at 14, Beryl was also extremely well read. 'She always read books about people's lives. She was always observing people,' adds Teresa.
A quick check on Beryl's Wikipedia page reveals her paintings are classed as 'naive'.
'There was nothing naive about Beryl,' argues Teresa. 'You could call her early paintings naive in the fact that they weren't sophisticated, but never naive.'
Quite the opposite, Beryl often painted the ordinary man or woman at their raucous best. And, a master of her art, Beryl's attention to detail captured all of humanity's tics, secret desires and regrets.
'And lots of people smoking,' pipes up Sophie. 'Even when Grandma was forced to give up smoking – she could hardly breathe because of her asthma – she always had a full ashtray of butts in her studio!'
'I think it wasn't so much the smoking as the oil paints,' contradicts Teresa. 'She was breathing in those oil fumes every day for years.'
A prolific painter, Beryl famously said how instead of doing housework, she would go and paint. 'She'd have breakfast, go to the shops for an hour, then come back and paint until lunchtime, then go up and paint until the light faded,' continues her daughter-in-law.
'Most paintings would take her a week or two.' Which explains why there are at least 500 Beryl Cook paintings out there.
When she found fame, they were snapped up by celebrities like Yoko Ono and Jackie Collins.
'And more are still being discovered,' adds Teresa. 'Which is not easy because she never signed them, you see, she didn't feel like a real artist.'
It's quite a back catalogue for someone without any formal training. Born in Surrey in 1926, one of four sisters brought up by their mum, after their dad left, Beryl turned her hand to a variety of jobs in London including model and showgirl.
'Well, she modelled knitting patterns,' laughs Teresa. 'And it was her sister who was a trained dancer, which is how she got roped into that.'
In 1948, she married her childhood friend John Cook, who served in the merchant navy, and their son John was born in 1950. She was briefly a pub landlady, but in 1956, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, and it was here that Beryl discovered her talent by accident.
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'John senior was a car salesman and his brother-in-law had moved out there,' Teresa explains. 'One day Beryl was keeping young John occupied by doing the same painting – but while her son didn't do so well, she discovered she liked painting!
'However, she didn't like apartheid, so they came back to England, and her husband bought her an oil painting set.'
After moving to Cornwall in 1965, Beryl started painting to cover her walls, then they bought a four-storey Georgian house on the Hooe, Plymouth, in 1968, and turned it into a guest house.
Art student Teresa met Beryl's son John in a pub in Plymouth, and he took her home. 'There were all these paintings all over the walls. I said, 'Oh, wow.' And she asked, 'Do you like them?' I told her, 'Yeah, I do.' And we got on fine from then.'
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The seaside landlady kept a little room in the house where she did the ironing – and painted. 'The place was stacked with paintings,' says Teresa. 'She would paint on anything, like driftwood and log boxes.'
Teresa reminds Sophie: "Remember you used it as a toy box, didn't you? And it had all these nudes dancing around it.'
Beryl's granddaughter is now 41 and married with her own children in Cornwall, but she recalls spending wonderful weekends with her quirky and kind granny, having Sunday roasts and her 'wonderful lemon meringue pie'.
'My biggest memory is of her ice cream floats,' recalls Sophie with a smile. 'She liked cherry coke with a scoop of ice cream in it.'
Aside from making Beryl the odd tenner when punters bought pictures she'd hung in her friend's pub, the family made their money from paying guests.
'They had one place rented out below, one rented out above, and then they lived on the ground floor,' recalls Teresa. 'They had three bedrooms with sinks in the rooms where she did B&B in the summer.
'She purposely didn't have a guest lounge, so she didn't have to talk to them, and would leave their breakfast for them on a tray outside each room.
'I remember she'd never serve tomatoes next to the eggs – she didn't like the colour combination!'
Around this time, Teresa and John ran Elvira's Cafe in town, which also became the backdrop for some of Beryl's paintings
'She had this incredible photographic memory,' recalls Teresa. 'And when she looked at you, it felt uncomfortable because she was really looking.'
It was only a matter of time before Beryl's genius was discovered, and one day the late actress Joanna Tope stayed at their guest house and fell in love with the landlady's art.
'Joanna knew Bernard Samuels, who ran the Plymouth Arts Centre, and she told him, 'Oh, you've got to come and see this.' Bernard had to come around three times to persuade Beryl to actually have an exhibition.'
The exhibition was a sell-out and before long, Beryl became the toast of the town. She went national when a Sunday newspaper put her on their cover and she appeared on LWT's South Bank Show.
Worried people would be offended by her work, Beryl was tickled when she discovered the public loved her art.
'She received so much fan mail and it gave her an enormous boost,' says Teresa. 'She didn't want fame, she wanted her paintings to be famous. And the only reason she did TV was for her fans. She was terribly nervous over all that sort of thing and used to have a little drink beforehand!'
In 1995 Beryl was awarded an OBE, which she was too shy to collect, but the fame and fortune that came with it meant she could lavish money on her most precious thing – her family. 'She was very generous with us,' agrees Teresa.
Happily, the artist, who was by then in her late 50s, got to enjoy some of the rewards. 'She treated herself by going to the US on Concorde and then they came back on the QE2 – she loved that,' says Teresa.
After suffering from cancer, Beryl died aged 81, in 2008. 'They say it was cancer, but she gave up when she couldn't paint any more,' reveals Teresa.
'She painted her last artwork Tommy Dancing in 2008, so she really did paint up until her last, but she was in terrible pain from sitting with her legs crossed at her easel for hours and leaning forward to paint.'
John senior enjoyed several more years before he passed away aged 88, in 2014.
Beryl always said family was 'the most important thing in my life, not my painting.'
But they love her painting - and so, now, does the art world. 'Her art has provided for us all,' says Sophie. 'And we're so grateful.'
• The Beryl Cook exhibition will be The Box, Plymouth, from January 24, 2026 at www.theboxplymouth.com
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