Beryl Cook
Product details
- ISBN 9781805702627
- Weight: 1050g
- Dimensions: 190 x 245mm
- Publication Date: 17 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Quarto Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Discover the life and work of Beryl Cook, one of Britain’s most recognisable artists, in this comprehensive guide.
Beryl Cook (1926–2008) is one of Britain’s most popular artists, renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everyday life. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic and colourful forms. She captures the spirit of the British ‘saucy seaside’ postcard.
She was a self-taught artist and her work came to prominence in the mid-1970s when she quickly became one of Britain’s best-loved artists. Her distinctive works have an immediately recognisable style and are both celebratory and provocative. Her work has been collected by Jackie Collins, Whoopi Goldberg and Yoko Ono amongst others.
Published for the centenary of her birth, Beryl Cook shows her key works together with unseen drawings and sketches, offering a comprehensive view of her artistic career alongside her personal history.
Whether you are a long-standing admirer or discovering Beryl Cook for the first time, this is the ideal moment to encounter her work in full.
Hilary Bracegirdle has enjoyed a career as a curator and director in a variety of museums, starting with the V&A and including The National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket and the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro. She has also held several roles at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (now known as The Box). She has looked after an extraordinary collection for Devon and Cornwall Police, worked as a heritage consultant and in 2015, completed the maximum six-year term as Committee Member, SW Committee for the Heritage Lottery Fund.
In the course of her work, Hilary has curated numerous exhibitions in the UK, Germany, the US and Japan. None of them made people quite so joyful as the Beryl Cook exhibition that she developed for Plymouth City Council in 2017. She continues to be in demand for her lively talks about Beryl.
Hilary has written numerous reports, options appraisals, strategies and business cases, and has published and edited catalogues, but none of them have been especially amusing. Beryl Cook is her first book.
