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signed and dated 53; also signed and inscribed with title on the reverse

oil on board

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the Artist by the present owner
EXHIBITED

Sunderland Arts Centre, Jack Smith: Paintings and Drawings 1949-1976, 1977, unnumbered catalogue, illustrated p.62.
CATALOGUE NOTE

The more our art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen (W.R.Sickert, 'Idealism', Art News, 12^th May 1910)

...the kitchen has a hallowed place in the history of art...The marmites of Chardin, the flayed chickens of Soutine, the eggs and frying pans of William Scott, are all part and parcel of the great mythology of European art (Anonymous review, 'Paintings for the Kitchen', Art News & Review, 12^th December 1953, Vol.5, no.23, p.2)

In an article written for the magazine Encounter in 1954, the critic David Sylvester unwittingly gave the 'Kitchen Sink' tag to the four painters also often grouped together as the 'Beaux Arts Quartet'; John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. However, recent art historical research has sought to look afresh at these painters, their relationship with each other and their position in the British art world of the 1950s. Now, with over half a century of hindsight, it is becoming possible to see not only how these paintings are informed by the spirit and concerns of the time but also how they fit into both a tradition and context of European social realism.

The 'Kitchen Sink' tag was the painters' equivalent of the contemporary writers' 'Angry Young Men' and whilst it became a convenient form for associating a particular genre of work, it tended to mask the very real differences between the artists and their work. Whilst most press attention was focussed on Bratby, whose shabby proto-beatnik public image came to typify the public perception of the left-orientated artist at the time (wrongly perhaps, as Bratby was later not in the least socialist), it was Smith whose work most clearly had the social-realist edge. Usually stark in colour and subject, Smith's work has its roots in his upbringing in working-class Sheffield. Between 1952 and 1954 he painted a series of domestic interiors which are still startling in their treatment of the depiction of the lives of the poor. Still Life with Running Tap was almost certainly painted in the basement kitchen of his lodgings at 44 Pembroke Road, London and closely relates to a number of paintings in which an unglamorous kitchen sink takes centre space. Of these, comparison may be drawn with the large Mother Bathing Child (London, Tate Gallery) of 1953 and Baby in Sink of the same year (Private Collection, sold in these rooms 2^nd June 2004 for £51,600, an auction record for the artist). The unremitting ordinariness of these paintings masks a very sophisticated compositional ability and acute capacity for rendering texture. Still Life with Running Tap is in fact rich in the collection of objects and textures which the artist spreads in front of us. The muted palette of the jumble of knives and forks and the glassware that lie across the table-top perhaps hints at the domestic still-life paintings of seventeenth century Holland and Spain, but Smith revels in a painterly manner which consciously rejects the 'tricks of the trade'. Smith gives us totally believable pressed glass, scrubbed wood, swollen lead piping and worn enamel into which floods a stream of water with apparent ease and simplicity, but somehow there is a luxuriance which, whilst perhaps not a pronkstilleven, is certainly marked.

Assisted by his part in the 1956 Venice Biennale exhibition 'Four Young Painters' and winning the 1957 John Moores Prize, Smith's work of this period is now extremely rare, with many early paintings now in municipal collections or lost.