Signed and dated lower right
Literature
James Hyman, Derrick Greaves:From Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La, Lund Humphries, London 2007, illustrated p.107.
Provenance
The Collection of Original Works for Children, Cambridgshire County Council
Private Collection, London
John Berger, one of Greaves's greatest early champions, wrote that ''The privilege - and I mean that in all modesty - of describing these works for the first time presents formidable difficulties; their originality, which manifests itself not in their novelty but in their profound obviousness, excludes all ready references.'' What Berger identified and stressed was a literal, mimetic quality, a direct relationship between Greaves''s handling of paint and the quality of the thing depicted: from the smoothness of a baby''s skin to the roughness of a worker''s hands. Arguing that ''Greaves has rejected every precept of academic teaching'', Berger praised the way that ''the arbitrariness of any one moment of life comes before the imposed pattern of any composition'', not so much a breakdown of the composition as a way of showing respect for each distinct element: ''Indeed each object is separate. If a man has only ten possessions, he tends to count them separately.''
A recurrent theme, from the 1950s onwards, was dogs and their scruffy presence is evident in some of Greaves's most powerful Italian pictures, such as the Arts Council's Dog (1955) and Men and Dogs in a Landscape (1953). Appropriately, it was the strength of Greaves's paintings of Italy that contributed to the decision to include him in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1956, where he showed four of his Italian paintings. This was the only occasion when the four ''Kitchen-Sink'' painters exhibited together outside Britain and was the crowning moment for the Beaux Arts Quartet. In a review of the Biennale, Alan Bowness addressed the inclusion of these four British painters, seeking to extract them from the term social realist:
The term ''social realist'' has been wisely dropped - it might be used for Greaves, but can only damage the others, whose interests, I should have thought, are far removed from the political. One must remember that these painters belong to the same generation as the novelists and poets of the Wain-Amis-Gunn-Larkin group, and they share many of the same preoccupations. Jack Smith seems to possess the writer''s brand of humanism to the full; Bratby has done some real Lucky Jim paintings; and Middleditch is the poet among the painters.
This, then, was the highpoint for social realism in general and the Kitchen-Sink painters in particular. When the prizes were announced for the John Moore''s Liverpool Exhibition in 1957, it was little surprise that the winners were almost entirely figurative painters, that they were predominantly exhibitors of the Beaux Arts Gallery, and that they included Bratby, Smith and Greaves.