Peter Coker 1926-2004

Born in London on 27nd July 1926, the son of a businessman Peter Godfrey Coker grew up in Leytonstone where he acquired a love of music from his mother and knowledge of engraving from his maternal grandfather who was a book-edge marbler. At Pettits School, near Havering, where he was a pupil from the age of eleven, he was recognised as a talented young artist by Rogerson, one of his schoolmasters. After school he started working for his father's confectionary business but soon left his job there to work for the book publishing section of Odhams Press, fetching art work and helping lettering book jackets whilst taking evening classes at St Martin's School of Art. He volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm in 1943 and continued studying full-time at St Martin's in 1946 where he remained until 1949-50. After leaving St Martin’s Coker travelled to France and Italy, and fell under the influence of the nineteenth-century Realist painter, Gustave Courbet.

In 1950 he began studying at the Royal College of Art where he was awarded two scholarships, and from 1954-1973 taught painting at St Martin’s, subsequently transferring his teaching skills to the City and Guilds of London Art School where he taught from 1973 to 1985. During these years in London he became acquainted with Derek Greaves, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, all of them part of a group devoted to scenes of domestic life under the name Kitchen Sink School. Coker became known for his paintings of stylised and bloodless animal carcases which were apparently memory images of a butcher’s near his home in Leytonstone, and in 1973 he achieved fame through hanging in a major Royal Academy Exhibition: Paintings and Drawings of the Butcher’s Shop.

He had a number of one-man shows in London and other parts of the country during the 1970s, including four solo exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery under the direction of Michael Chase, later Director of the Minories Art Gallery in Colchester. Increasing fame and a growing international reputation increased his public profile when he participated in the famous BBC radio programme The Critics in.

He was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1965 and Royal Academician in 1972. He also published a book entitled Etching Techniques in 1976. His later work was much inspired by Nicholas de Stael, and continued to be throughout the rest of Coker's life. However, de Stael died in 1985 and after this Coker suffered heart attacks and a stroke. His wife nursed him through this period and he began painting again in his last years.

Coker’s work is present in many public collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.