Jean Cooke

Jean Cooke (1927 - 2008)

Jean Cooke studied at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London under Carel Weight and Ruskin Spear. In 1953 she married the painter John Bratby and used his name until the marriage was dissolved in the late 1970s. She taught at the Royal College as a lecturer in painting from 1964 to 1974 and was elected as associate of the Royal Academy in 1965 and a full Academician in 1972. She shared her time between her home in Blackheath and a fisherman's cottage in Birling Gap, East Sussex. Cooke was an accomplished colourist and draughtsman; her intimate portraits, still-lifes and landscapes are dominated by a sense of familiarity and poetic poignancy.

Text source: Benezit Dictionary of Artists