Jean Esme Oregon Cooke RA (18 February 1927 – 6 August 2008) was an English painter of still lifes, landscapes, portraits and figures.

[1][2] Her mother had an artistic spirit, creating "beautiful colours to decorate the walls by subtly mixing odd touches of paint.

She studied life drawing under Bernard Meninsky, textile design, and illustration at the Central School until 1945.

[1][2] Initially, Cooke was most interested in pursuing sculpture, partly because oils were expensive and clay was free at the college.

[1][2] John Bratby, a Royal College of Art painter, and Cooke began a tempestuous dating relationship.

[1][2] Cooke's interest in painting grew under the tutelage of Ruskin Spear, Rodrigo Moynihan, and Carel Weight.

Bratby did not achieve the recognition that his wife received and he was upset by it, which made their relationship increasingly difficult.

The seascape at her cottage[nb 2] and the landscape surrounding her Edwardian mansion featured in her paintings: "cherry trees in full bloom, long grass filled with buttercups and blue-flowering lungwort, or the dark evergreens lit by the house windows at night.

In the early 1980s she painted a full-length portrait of her next-door neighbor, the baroque cellist Richard Webb.

Her works reflected sensitivity, beauty, and insight - made with a "subtle, understated, individual sense of colour."

Blast Bodicea was made at the urging of her husband, John Bratby, who had given her a heavy brass fireman's helmet to be included in the work.

Jean left their home in fear, but would return based on the advice of their mentor and family friend, Carel Weight.

[3] Andrew Lambirth wrote of her in the days following her death: Jean Cooke was a painter of wit and subtlety, a lovely and unusual colourist who painted landscape and still-life with great but understated feeling.

She was also a figure painter, and a dab hand at portraits, but her finest achievement was in the depiction of the natural world: cliffs and the sea, a mountain meadow, the effects of mist or moonlight, a collection of fruit or flowers.