John Bratby
Kitchen Sink painter of bins, cornflake packets and cluttered rooms, laid on an inch thick.
John Bratby was born in Wimbledon in 1928 and came out of the Royal College of Art into instant attention as the loudest of the Kitchen Sink School, alongside Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. The subject was domestic and deliberately unlovely — a kitchen table, a lavatory, packets and bottles, his wife Jean Cooke at the sink — and the paint went on in impasto so heavy it stands proud of the canvas. He painted the pictures attributed to Gulley Jimson in the 1958 film of The Horse's Mouth, was elected to the Royal Academy, and spent his later years at Hastings painting portraits at great speed. He died in 1992.
The output is enormous and the quality across it is not even, which is the central fact in any valuation: the 1950s Kitchen Sink pictures and the late portraits are separate markets that happen to share a signature. Many works are on board rather than canvas. The heavy impasto is structurally fragile, cracks and sheds at the peaks, and cannot be made good invisibly, so a raking-light look at the surface is worth more than a photograph taken face-on. Signature and date are usually present and usually prominent.
If you own a work by John Bratby
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.