Cave Painting II is one of Jean Cooke’s most significant coastal landscape paintings. It belongs to a small group of original pictures in which the glistening sea at the horizon is viewed from inside a chalk cave. The imagery is highly personal to the artist and has been interpreted by the curator Jane Alison as having ‘an unmistakeable suggestion of the female body, as she [Cooke] conjures a space that is like a vaginal aperture from a womb-like enclosure.’ The paint surface of Cave Painting II is lightly handled. The extremities of the picture use washes of transparent oil paint applied roughly onto an off-white ground, evoking the texture and grubbiness of sea-washed chalk. The execution is inventively varied: fine brushstrokes of dry green paint were used to depict strands of seaweed, which crisscross the roof of the cave; several dashed lines, created by sequences of small black dashes, suggest the rounded walls of the cave; and some comparatively heavy touches of impasto evoke the shingle beach beyond the cave mouth. The picture’s suggestive title evokes prehistoric painted caves at Lascaux and elsewhere, and this reference is inextricable from Cooke’s application of paint in vigorous, elementary mark-making.

The cave depicted in Cave Painting II is along a famous stretch of chalk cliffs in the county of East Sussex. There are twenty or so caves in the cliffs between Birling Gap and Beachy Head lighthouse. According to the artist’s son David Bratby, Cooke would take her children to the coast in the summer and spend several hours at a time in these caves, occasionally making small fires there. This landscape was of special importance to Cooke, who moved with her family during the Second World War to live in the nearby village of East Dean and made regular visits to the area from the mid-sixties until her death in 2008. One of the key subjects in Cooke’s oeuvre is the sea and coastline around Birling Gap, and her ‘cave paintings’ are some of the largest and most vivid of these works.

This painting was one of three large-format ‘Cave Paintings’ that Cooke exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1971. They received critical praise from Marina Vaizey, who wrote in the Financial Times: ‘Jean Cooke glimpses the sea through the entrances of caves carved out of chalk in some large landscape paintings of stirring originality’. Although they relate to other cave paintings that Cooke made at Birling Gap in the mid-sixties (fig. 1), these works have greater size and suggest grander ambition. The greater size of these works was possibly enabled by Cooke’s acquisition of a studio nearby, 1 Crangon Cottages, formerly a coastguard’s cottage, which she started renting from the National Trust sometime in the early seventies.

For many years Cave Painting II hung in the artist’s home at 7 Hardy Road in Blackheath. It appeared alongside Cave Painting I in another painting of Cooke’s, Sofas Galore, where the lower edge of both paintings is visible over the back of the chesterfield sofa (fig. 2). Their prominent place in Cooke’s family home was expressive of the profound connection between the artist’s existence in London and her imaginative, creative life on the Sussex coast.