Britain has lost one of its best-loved artists, the painter Beryl Cook, who has died at her home in Plymouth at the age of 81. She had been suffering from cancer for some time but, typically reticent, had kept it all but a secret.

There will be many to mourn her. Who is not familiar with Cook’s distinctive fat ladies? You could hardly miss them. They are about as discreet as a drunken hen party along Plymouth Hoe. They cavort about her pictures with rambunctious abandon; they hitch up tight party frocks and flash frilly knickers; they wobble their bosoms and bawl Knees up Mother Brown.

Even if you have never encountered an original Cook image, you are sure to recognise her creations from any number of reproductions. Her fat ladies have appeared on anything from greetings cards and jigsaw puzzles to an animated BBC sitcom.

Cook had an infectious enthusiasm for life. It was probably this that made her so popular. It bursts out of her paintings like a stripper bursts out of a cake. But although her works were collected by a few regional galleries, her appeal seldom seems to have spread to the cultural elite, who often scorned the seaside-postcard slapstick of this “Rubens with jokes” (as Victoria Wood described her). There are no paintings by Beryl Cook in the Tate.

Should there be? My immediate instinct is to say, yes, of course. The Tate is a public gallery. It should make a place for one of the public’s best-loved painters. Cook may not be an art highbrow but she has given enormous pleasure. Few contemporaries have captured their era in more detail than this self-taught enthusiast.

Cook took up painting only in 1963 when, at the age of about 40, she returned with her husband after eight years in Rhodesia to become a boarding house landlady, first in Looe, Cornwall, and then in Plymouth, where she was to remain for the rest of her life. She would work all summer and then paint during the quiet winter months until slowly she found herself busier with her paintings than her lodgers.

Over the years her paintings have become part of our artistic vernacular. They offer a portrait of contemporary life: complete with all its characters from the man with the pint to the woman with the perm through the girl at the checkout to the pitbull in the pub. Together her pictures accumulate to create a sort of high street fashion catalogue. Here are the string vests and the white stilettos, the leopard-skin prints and the hotpants, the Little Chef uniforms and the kiss-me-quick sailor hats.

Nothing is too humble or insignificant for Cook’s attention. From the queue in the ladies’ lavatory through the full English breakfast to the smouldering cigarette butts, she notices it all. Right to the end of her life, she could be found wandering around Plymouth in a pair of oversized plim-solls with her sketchbook, and later a digital camera, hidden in her capacious handbag. She was observing everything from the way that a man puts his thumbs in his braces or takes his false teeth out to examine them at a bar.

Who more accurately captures the essence of our English vulgarities? In future years, historians will be able to reconstruct a picture of our society from her works. And yet, the more you think about it, the more it starts to feel as if her pictures might not in fact find the right home in the Tate. Cook did not set out to probe passionate depths or explore urban dystopias or take spiritual flights.

She simply set out to please. Her complete lack of egotism was as refreshing as it was essential to her talent. All she wanted was to see people having a good time. That was what started her painting. And that was what continued to motivate her. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted her work in the Tate’s hallowed temples. Maybe it was more fitting for people to enjoy it in their homes as a funny greetings card.

As she told The Times in a rare interview on the occasion of her last show at the Portal Gallery, which represented her for many years: “All I ever wanted was people like me to enjoy my pictures. So I don’t worry one iota about the Tate.”

The World of Beryl Cook Buy the book

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