Bratby was trained at the Royal College of Art, where he met fellow student Jean Cooke whom he married in April 1954. The same year Bratby had the first of a series of one-man exhibitions at the acclaimed Beaux Arts Gallery, and his public career was launched. With his trademark thick paint and his flair for publicity (he had a talent for leaking stories to the press), Bratby soon became not only a folk hero in the art schools of Britain, but a household name. At first the critics' response was overwhelmingly supportive, with the Sunday Times comparing Bratby's rendition of a cornflake packet favourably with Velázquez's Rokeby Venus. A major early painting, Still-Life with Chip Frier, was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1956.  

The term ‘kitchen sink realism’ was first used by David Sylvester in a review of the Beaux Arts Quartet. Writing in Encounter in December 1954 he noted that their work: ‘takes us back from the studio to the kitchen’ and described their subjects as: ‘an inventory which includes every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even babies’ nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too.’ Sylvester also emphasised that these kitchens were ones ‘in which ordinary people cooked ordinary food and doubtless lived their ordinary lives.’[3]  The term as it was initially applied to the work of Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, was meant satirically and rejected by the artists themselves. But it soon had traction in describing their paintings of and more widely to characterise plays, novels and films whose working class protagonists railed against the banality of domestic convention. Kitchen sink drama was most famously embodied by John Osborne in his play Look Back in Anger of 1956, the publicity for which in-turn coined the term ‘Angry young men’, but it was Sylvester’s description of Bratby’s paintings which has definitively described this cultural movement. Kitchen Sink reached its apogee in 1956 when the Beaux Arts Quartet were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Bratby’s powerful drawing precisely crystallises this moment in British art. This kitchen scene executed with an expressionistic power suggests the new social realism praised by Berger. Jean Cooke is seen standing amongst the domestic clutter of the kitchen; as with other compositions of the period, such as Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window, now in Southampton City Art Gallery, Bratby depicts her naked. At the centre of the composition is their son, David, seated in his highchair with a baby mouli prominently placed on its tray. Bratby has deliberately altered the perspective to reveal the interior of the mouli with its handle and blade. On the floor are a number of packages of familiar children’s food – Farley’s rusks, Groats and Farex – along with a child’s bottle; the linoleum floor itself is a carefully drawn mosaic of geometric shapes. The ambitious, boldly drawn, black chalk composition echoes Bratby’s technique as a painter, with areas of deep shadow achieved by heavy working. Whether Bratby was conscious of the social and political ambitions ascribed by commentators such as Berger, his work was designed as a rejection of contemporary British art; his realism was seen as more egalitarian than both the neo-romanticism of John Piper and John Minton and the abstractions of Ben Nicholson.[4]  Whilst it was rapidly overshadowed by American abstract expressionism and pop art, Bratby and the other Kitchen Sink realists represented an important, if brief moment, in post-war British art and the present powerful drawing is perfect distillation of these ideas.