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Lot Essay
The present work was painted in the year that Bratby graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1954, the same year as his first one-man show at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London.
John Berger's Beaux Arts Exhibition review comments 'Bratby paints as though he sensed that he only had one more day to live. He paints a packet of cornflakes on a littered table as though it were part of a last supper ... He paints every picture in order to impress the subject so vividly in his consciousness that he will never lose it' (M. Yacowar, The Great Bratby: A Portrait of John Bratby, London, 2008, p. 30).
Bratby celebrated the subject matter of the domestic interior with the chaos of bric-a-brac from modern life. He comments on another of his 'taple top' works: 'It was done with the majority of my Taple Top Still Lifes during July or August of 1954, just after my studies at the Royal College of Art. I was working at my wife's father's house at Greenwich. There I had a room on the top floor ... I used the same table every time, and eating equipment from the kitchen. The works were therefore contrived and artificially set up. So the work was not a direct painting of the table top just as the cook left it' (see P. Davies, Bratby, Gwent, 2002, p. 53).
In 1956 and 1958 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. His renown in the 1950s was such that the Tate, London and Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired his works. 'By the 'swinging sixties' Bratby could be claimed as the first genuinely popular artist of the television age. A proto-pop artist whose raw, unadorned still life painting featuring Kellog's Cornflakes packets and other brand name objects caught the eye of the popular imagination' (M. Yacowar, The Great Bratby: A Portrait of John Bratby, London, 2008, p. 33).
John Berger's Beaux Arts Exhibition review comments 'Bratby paints as though he sensed that he only had one more day to live. He paints a packet of cornflakes on a littered table as though it were part of a last supper ... He paints every picture in order to impress the subject so vividly in his consciousness that he will never lose it' (M. Yacowar, The Great Bratby: A Portrait of John Bratby, London, 2008, p. 30).
Bratby celebrated the subject matter of the domestic interior with the chaos of bric-a-brac from modern life. He comments on another of his 'taple top' works: 'It was done with the majority of my Taple Top Still Lifes during July or August of 1954, just after my studies at the Royal College of Art. I was working at my wife's father's house at Greenwich. There I had a room on the top floor ... I used the same table every time, and eating equipment from the kitchen. The works were therefore contrived and artificially set up. So the work was not a direct painting of the table top just as the cook left it' (see P. Davies, Bratby, Gwent, 2002, p. 53).
In 1956 and 1958 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. His renown in the 1950s was such that the Tate, London and Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired his works. 'By the 'swinging sixties' Bratby could be claimed as the first genuinely popular artist of the television age. A proto-pop artist whose raw, unadorned still life painting featuring Kellog's Cornflakes packets and other brand name objects caught the eye of the popular imagination' (M. Yacowar, The Great Bratby: A Portrait of John Bratby, London, 2008, p. 33).