Peter Coker’s reputation as an artist is founded on his acute realist sensibility. He first saw the work of Gustave Courbet in Paris in 1949, and the French artist was to be a touchstone throughout Coker’s career. After studying a post-graduate course at the Royal College of Art between 1950 and ’54, he spent five years producing a series of concise, open-grained still-life paintings. These works were first shown publicly at Zwemmer Gallery in 1956 and won Coker instant praise. The paintings were dubbed as ‘meatscapes’, notwithstanding a work like Fish with Grill which deviates from the more numerous pictures of unplucked chickens and hares. The visual qualities of these early still-life paintings have been summarised by Coker’s obituarist, the art historian Frances Spalding. Their crusty surfaces were created by lining the board on which he worked with white lead and oil, a mixture used by plumbers to secure pipe joints. Powerfully designed, their sinewy architecture owed much to a subtle interplay of verticals and horizontals. These paintings immediately associated him with the Kitchen Sink artists – John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. The paintings described by Spalding are unified by a certain style of composition – each table top is tilted up and squared with the plane of the canvas – and by certain recurring objects. Coker’s still life belonged to the kitchen rather than the dining room, being populated by grizzled onions, a black-handled knife, a gridle, the soiled wrappings (sometimes newspaper) used by the butcher, a lump of stale bread, some cheese, and the eponymous comestibles: Still Life with Chicken (n.d., Mansfield District Council), Still Life with Hare (1959, Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery), Pig’s Head (1955, Norfolk Museums), and Dead Hare on Table (1955, Arts Council Collection) (fig. 1), for example. The strong vertical and horizontal lines of these works came largely from the rough, wide-grained planks of the table tops which Coker used. Unlike the paintings of his ‘Kitchen Sink’ contemporaries, whose still-life compositions tend towards a busy confusion of victuals and (in Bratby’s case) branded packaging, Coker’s meat and fish paintings afford an important visual role to the bare table surface itself. Each painting allows the bare planks to extend through the full width or length of the picture plane. Rather than treat them as simplified compositional elements, Coker’s still-life paintings particularise the graining and knots in a table top. By giving them sustained visual scrutiny, he was able to enliven ‘background’ subjects and give them a rich and indeterminate visual interest. This approach was later adopted by another post-war realist painter, Lucian Freud, whose portraits often give careful attention to the quality of bare floorboards. As well as achieving detail, Coker’s still-life pictures employed an original approach to composition. In each work, the relationship between the represented table and the canvas support has been formalised. The two things are set in parallel. Where Bratby, Smith and Greaves favoured a three-quarter-length composition, standing back from the table to survey its unruly surface and to include the chairs and table legs, Coker adopted a cropped view which included the surface alone. By tipping up the surface to make it ‘stand up’ vertically in the painting, he was able to create a degree of equivalence between canvas and table top. This proposition was further supported by the use of coarse materials like white lead – plumbers’ materials, as Spalding said. These bestow paintings like Fish with Grill with qualities more redolent of workaday objects than of fine art. These paintings by Coker represent the best of the still-life tradition in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Fish with Grill is the equal of works by John Bratby like Still Life with Chip Frier (1954, Tate Collection) or by Jack Smith like Still Life with Plaice (1955, Government Art Collection). The combination of impasto and a low-key tonality in his paintings is characteristic of this period, and a similar effect is found in the contemporary output of artists such as Prunella Clough. Yet Fish with Grill and other similar works by Coker succeed because of the underlying process of accumulation: the enriched wood grain of the table top, cutlery that evokes the props from Golden Age Dutch still-life painting, the paint-encrusted flesh and so on. Paint is used to describe rather than to impress, registering the cumulative build-up of observation. In this respect, a work like Fish with Grill is a lasting contribution to the tradition of European realist painting.