Beaux Arts Quartet

Beaux Arts Quartet was the name given to a group of four young British realist painters whose work was shown at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in the early 1950s. The quartet comprised John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, and Jack Smith, and their patron was the gallery's owner and director Helen Lessore, who consistently championed figurative painting against the fashion for abstraction. The artists depicted the ordinary, often bleak everyday life of post-war working-class Britain—cramped kitchens, sinks, food scraps, and shabby interiors—for which the critic David Sylvester coined the broader name "Kitchen Sink School." Their rough, earthy-coloured style echoed the contemporary "Angry Young Men" movement in literature and theatre. In 1956 the four painters represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, attesting to the importance of this tendency for mid-century British art.