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Inspired by the Chris Beetles Gallery solo exhibition of his work and our publication of the book, Peter Coker RA, in 2002, Peter returned to painting after more than a decade of recuperation following a major stroke in 1990. The vigorous brushwork of the Châtelet series, was painted in Paris on the banks of the Seine between the Pont au Change and Pont Neuf. Painting from different angles up and down the Seine and at different times of day, he painted from the Hotel Châtelet, where he and Vera were staying. His abstracted brushwork evocatively represented the bustling road junction with constant movement and flashing traffic lights. Peter was so pleased with the results he exhibited several of these works at the Royal Academy and in turn the series galvanised him to paint consistently for the next two years, up to his death in 2004.
The eminent author and art critic John Russell Taylor, who died in 2025, wrote with enthusiasm of this period of work when reviewing an Exhibition of Peter Coker's work at Gainsborough's House, Sudbury in 2003:
"It is the resurrection of a painter we had imagined permanently lost to us. in early 1990 Peter Coker, in his late sixties, suffered two heart attacks and a serious stroke. Although he continued to paint during the next two years, he gradually felt compelled to give up the practice of art, and most of the travel that had always so inspired
But two years ago he returned to his beloved Paris, in a wheelchair, bought some new art materials and started to paint again. Probably the visit inspired him to take out from some bottom drawer the drawings he had made there in the Seventies, and these became the basis for the extraordinary paintings, etchings and lithographs that have occupied him during the past year. A handful signalled his return to the art scene at this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and now a more generous display lights up the museum
in Sudbury.
It must immediately be said that this whole history is totally irrelevant to the effect of the new work. The energy is prodigious, the colours intense to saturation, and the bare facts of the old view from a second-floor window of the Hôtel Châtelet are transformed into a phantasmagoria of almost abstract shapes and gestures. It is something quite new for Coker, though if one looks back to the last works he made before withdrawal, such as his 1992 paintings from a hotel window in Menton, he seems also to have taken up exactly where he left off.
And now that he is back, there seems no reason why he should not go on for ever."
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