Artist     William Brooker
Title      Paddington Bedroom
Date      1950's
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       30.5 x 48cm
Ref          54

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Paddington Bedroom
William Brooker (1918-1983) began his art education in 1936, but his training at Croydon Art School was interrupted by army service and his studies were not resumed until 1947, when he studied at Chelsea School of Art and later Goldsmiths.

Brooker taught at many English art schools; possibly his most eminent pupil was Howard Hodgkin who later wrote: ‘He was the only real teacher I ever had . . . he made one feel that painting was a very important occupation. Quite unique. No one else seemed a bit like that. He was a great teacher.' (1)

Having shared a house with Bryan Wynter and later Terry Frost he exhibited with the London Group from around 1950. In 1952 went to Cornwall with William Scott, visiting Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and others in the County.

In 1953 he became Head of Painting at Willesden School of Art Studio in Chelsea, five years later moving to a senior lectureship at Harrow School of Art and then at Ealing School of Art from 1960. In 1965 Brooker became Senior Lecturer at Central School of Art and Design, going on to the elevated status of Principal of Wimbledon School of Art between 1968-1981.

He had several one-man exhibitions at Arthur Tooth and Son (until 1975) and in 1979 held his first one-man exhibition at Thos. Agnew & Sons. In 1980 he was elected ARA, and to the RWA later the same year.

Brooker’s early work was firmly located within the broad genre of English impressionism, continuing the tradition established by Vuillard and Bonnard, but translated into its distinctly English idiom by Walter Sickert and commonly referred to as ‘the Camden Town Group’.

Sickert wanted his pictures to be like ‘ ‘page torn from the book of life’ and he settled in north London to paint the mundane and the everyday. His Camden Town nudes – to which Brooker’s oil painting owes so much – depict dark and dingy interiors, ill-lit models and subdued décor, invariably painted in a robust style that was the pole opposite of the swagger portraits of society folk captured by John Singer Sargent and the like. For all its outward melancholy and drabness, Brooker’s paintings of this period strikes at the heart of a distinctively British twentieth century aesthetic.

The chief legacy of this approach to realism, argues one critic, was that it lent ‘renewed moral and pictorial force to the ideal of an undeceived, disillusioned vision in British art’. It gave the British ‘back a part of their own temperament’. (2)

(1) History of Corsham School of Art, website: www.baacorsham.co.uk
(2) Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art, University of California Press, 1999, p.220

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