Art & Life: The Paintings of Beryl Bainbridge, Somerset House, Inigo Rooms, King's College Cultural Institute

The Artist...
Not all writers achieve ‘national treasure’ status, but Dame Beryl Bainbridge was among them. Dark, bird-like, and with a characterful face that testified to a lifetime's affair with cigarettes, Dame Beryl was a fixture at literary parties – infamously, she was short-listed for the Booker Prize five times  – and was one of the great faces of bohemian Camden Town. Less well known is that Bainbridge was something of a polymath. A Lancastrian with Liverpudlian roots, she once made a very plausible appearance in Coronation Street and, as this fabulous little exhibition shows, she also painted extremely well.
The Exhibition...
 On show in the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House you’ll see Bainbridge’s colourful, eerie pictures, which often look like book illustrations – because in a sense, they were. As a historical novelist it makes complete sense that she drew pictures of figures like Captain Oates on Scott's last Antarctic expedition, Samuel Johnson and Napoleon. And she drew pictures from her own life too; as if part of the art of characterisation and narrative-building. These paintings have an enigmatic and almost surreal quality, including images of children with enlarged eyes and elongated bedposts, bringing the viewer into scenes from magical stories. This exhibition also shows that Bainbridge was a whizz with acidic colours, and the way she mixed line-drawing with washes of paint shows something of the Gothic romanticism of great British artists like John Piper.
Our thoughts...
So they're good and as it turns out, Bainbridge was once a rather successful artist who simply chose to concentrate on literature. Early in her career she sold her paintings for £25 a go, making money from them during straitened years in Liverpool. She herself said they ‘sold like hot cakes’ and was offered shows in galleries. Then her literary career took off and Bainbridge joined that curious, fascinating club – which also includes DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs – of writers that also painted. But this show is successful enough to makes us think that she was equally a painter that also wrote.