"The Horse's Mouth" illustrated

    John Bratby is known for his energetic and crowded "Kitchen sink" paintings.  His work reached a wider popular audience throughout the 1958 film of Joyce Cary's novel, The Horse's Mouth. Alec Guinness played the reprobate London artist, Gulley Jimson, and Bratby provided Jimson's paintings for the film.  They were far more in character and believable than is usual in many films.

David in the Kitchen, with Thistles Hartlepool Museum & Heritage Service © artist's estate

Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window Southampton City Art Gallery © artist's estate

In this next work, Bratby has taken an unusual moving viewpoint, a self-portrait of the artist in his workshop: both looking down from a high angle at the seated figure's hands and looking forward into the room, with two other oddly cropped figures holding paintbrushes, multifarious equipment, and the view out of the window.  The green trousers suggest that all three figures are the artist. His paintings, as well as presenting aspects of everyday life with bold colour and strong line, are also full of intriguing content.  

The Artist Painting a Picture 
Museums of Sheffield © the artist's estate

London river

London River

For John Minton

"The world ends at  the pier, the purple snake

of the river vanishing into sunset, though

somewhere beyond, locked like a secret, another

existence begins -- with laws of its own

and a brotherhood because of no other, begun

when the coast is shed in the wake like a skin.

But, tied to the riveted stakes of habit, barges

copper as souvenirs of Egypt, pull and return

with the tide on a backspring, lazily large

for a day at their moorings, with money to burn

in the pockets of dockers, or sailors living

a one-night week, the rest an endurance.

It depends on the night, for nothing is lasting --

neither profit nor pleasure, which flare up

like a fire and founder as damply at leisure
--and unless you were there and looked up
catching the spark in its diamond of laughter,
nothing would remain to witness it later.

For sailors and waterfronts like Chinese boxes
hide away in layers behind unsmiling secrets
and carry different faces on Sundays
and Mondays, their surfaces ambiguous as foxes,
who snarl at themselves in a pool when frightened,
afraid of the trick that might prove them a fool.

Life here, as its environs, is precarious--
a world built up like a matchstick warehouse,
a mixture of spices and sawdust, timber
and sacking, that grows dormant at sunset
or lights up at sunrise its debris of history,
but where never a stable perspective is lacking.

Poems   Alan John Ross (1922-2001)

Rotherhithe from Wapping,  John Minton

© Royal College of Art,  Photocredit Southampton City Art Gallery