Still Life with Fish, 1957, was exhibited at Peter Coker’s third solo exhibition with the Zwemmer Gallery in 1959, one of only two still-life oils in an exhibition dominated by landscapes. On Coker’s usual grainy wooden table, a black frying pan holds a whole
fish, probably a mackerel, with a handful of vegetables including a cauliflower and garlic scattered across the table top. Coker has alighted upon the domesticity of a meal in progress, a brief pause as ingredients are prepared but cooking not yet begun. The extraordinary angle of Still Life with Fish, so that the table top is parallel to that of the picture plane, was formulated in reality by Coker: “I worked from drawings, finding much greater imaginative freedom, lifting the tables up (inclining the plane by
propping up the back legs) creating the impetus for particular distortions.”

An exhibition in 1979 at the Royal Academy, that toured the UK, presented Coker’s Butcher’s Shop works as a distinct and potent part of his oeuvre. The catalogue was introduced by Coker’s son, Nicholas, who emphasised the significance of texture to the
oils: “Texture is important, a smooth slab of paint for example, becomes our sense of a roll of fat. The tactile quality of the images is due to this kind of correspondence, and is part of an attempt to make the form more real.” The immensely dense impasto paint
laid over lead white applied to the board support takes on a near sculptural quality. Coker continues: “In that the painting is made as a reality, ultimately independent of the subject, the thickness of the paint attains to the objective reality formerly associated with the shape of the object.” As well as depicting the form of the still-life, the painting adopts the substance of the objects within the still-life, laying claim to its own objectivity through the sheer weight of its materiality.

Still Life with Fish was acquired by Stanley J. Seeger, the prominent American collector, to hang above his bed in Sutton Place, reportedly replacing a Francis Bacon triptych. It is one of the last remaining examples of Coker’s Kitchen Sink Group works
to remain in private hands with the majority held in public collections including Sheep Carcasses on a Bench, 1955; Royal Academy of Arts, Man Carrying Pig, 1955; Tate, Table and Chair (featuring Nicholas Coker as a child), 1955; Tate, and Butcher’s Shop No. 1, 1955; Museums Sheffield.