Lot 56: William Brooker (British, 1918-1983) Still life 101.5 x 127 cm. (40 x 50 in.)

Still life
signed and dated 'Brooker '64' (lower centre)
oil on canvas
101.5 x 127 cm. (40 x 50 in.)

PROVENANCE:
Gifted by the artist to the present owner on the occasion of her marriage in 1964

William Brooker's early work had originally been indebted to Sickert and English anecdotal Impressionism. The 20th century brought with it new influences, primarily from France, and Brooker reacted to this during the 1950s when he appears to have changed his style and rejected the Camden Town and Euston Road traditions. Writing in the preface to the artist's important 1968 one man exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons, Edwin Mullins commented 'suddenly formal compositions replaced genre, objects replaced people, an interior became a kind of laboratory, a cell, rather than a place to live in. Then there is the rich fuzz of paint which drags light gently into shadow across the surface of the canvas, picking up as it goes all sorts of echoes (after images) of those still-life objects clustered on the table below. Bottles, pots, jars, boxes, they have half-lost their identity until after a while the shadows between and around them become more positive shapes than they. Brooker's still-lifes acquire the anonymity of objects stared at so hard they shed their meaning, except the meaning they bestow on the space around them.' (Edwin Mullins, William Brooker, Paintings 1952-1968, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, 6-24 February 1968, p.1)