Art & Life: The Paintings of Beryl Bainbridge

In the window of Beryl Bainbridge’s house there sat a life-sized male mannequin she baptised Neville Chamberlain. He was there to see off burglars. He was also there because she just liked him. Like the stuffed fox on the sofa or the life-sized dead (obviously) buffalo in her entrance hall that caused a squeeze point for those wanting entry to her world. Upstairs, downstairs, all over the stairs in fact, Beryl’s house was packed with ‘things’. Detritus that she had collected over the 45 years she had lived there. It was also packed with her paintings – gems hidden in plain sight.

I knew Beryl a little, not enough to have been invited into her Aladdin’s cave of a home, but for a while our paths crossed on a small magazine. I was already a fan of her writing but had no idea that she was also a painter until shortly after her death, when her family agreed to a small, discreet show at a mental-health unit in Chelsea. It was a revelation, a cache of pictures to rival most of the greats of the 20th century. The observational fluidity of her portraits of family, friends, lovers and the occasional rural scene (she was a city girl) were the stuff of dreams. This was her secret life. She would paint for release, after every book, to visualise her stories, perhaps. Who knows, she was Beryl Bainbridge. The genius survivor who was kicked out of school in Liverpool at 14 only to go on to be nominated for the Booker Prize five times (finally winning it posthumously) and dying as a Dame. This free, timelined Art & Life exhibition is just that: a map of her life and output.

Like the plots of her novels, her paintings start with her life and end with dramatised versions of others. The Titanic And Lifeboat, painted alongside her book, Every Man For Himself, is a vast, all-consuming canvas. There are the Napoleon oils, wellworked metaphors of men and menace, including Don As Napoleon, a tribute to her lover, the artist Don McKinlay. And the self-portraits from the 1970s.


Her daughter Jojo once said that she would write five pages to get one paragraph – that intensity of prose doesn’t come easy. She would work at night while her children slept and then paint. The Birthday Boys, her novel of Captain Scott’s doomed mission, resulted in Captain And Mrs Scott, a painting that makes Ruskin Spear look like an amateur and which makes you want to weep, not least for the Beryl we didn’t know.

Until 19 October at the Inigo Rooms, King’s College London WC2: www.kcl.ac.uk