(Updated January 2014)This artist is most readily known for his association with the British 'kitchen-sink group' of painters of the 1950s. As well as works of social realism, he has also produced landscapes throughout his career. Here he has created a strong visual and conceptual experience of a seascape through the application of thick impasto paint for the stormy sea, with thinner paint representing the sky and rain. With cliffs visible on the left, the rainbow has been slashed across the horizon to the centre of this atmospheric work. The movement of the water contrasts with the solidity and darkness of the sky.

Coker was working in the Scottish isles from 1970 but this painting is from the Yorkshire coast according to his own description. It was originally shown at the Thackeray Gallery, London, then at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1975, and received very favourable press notices; subsequently at Chelmsford and Essex Museum in 1978, Edinburgh in 1979 and the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts, Antwerp, in 1981. In May 1982 the artist and the NMM's Director, Basil Greenhill, happened to sit opposite each other at the RA exhibition dinner and Coker offered it to the Museum as a gift once he had retrieved it from Antwerp, for which the Museum paid. Coker was born in 1926, elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1965 and Academician in 1972. Living in Essex in his later years (at The Red House, Mistley) he died on 16 December 2004. His widow, Vera Joyce (nee Crook, b. 1926, m. 1951), by training a scientist, died aged 87 on 18 December 2013. Tragically, their only son (Nicholas Godfrey,1952-85) predeceased them, which had a severe effect on his father's long-term health and work thereafter, though his painting resumed more actively in later years.