Thomas Sidney Cooper

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Self-portrait (c. 1832)
Thomas Sidney Cooper Fording a brook, suburbs of Canterbury 1834
The Battle of Waterloo, 1847. Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead
Cattle in the pasture by Thomas Sidney Cooper, 1881.


Thomas Sidney Cooper CVO RA (26 September 1803 – 7 February 1902) was an English landscape painter from Canterbury, noted for his images of cattle and farm animals.[1]

Early life

Thomas Sidney Cooper was born in St Peter's Street in

Royal Academy.[3]

Unable to afford to continue living in London he was forced to return to Canterbury, where he earnt a living as a drawing master and by the sale of sketches and drawings. In 1827 he and friend went to Brussels and through some luck and perseverance, Cooper started to make a living through painting portraits and also becoming a drawing master. Here he met and married Charlotte Pearson. He also met Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven who was to have a great influence on his painting. The Belgian Revolution of 1830 saw Cooper and Charlotte returning to London. He showed his first picture at the Royal Academy in 1833, beginning a long and prolific career as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy and British Institution among others.[4] His 'Intercepted Raid, Ettrick Shepherd', exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, an oil on canvas, sold at Sotheby’s for £37,500 making it, at that time, the most valuable work to be sold at auction.[5]

When the competition was announced for the decoration for the new

Life Guards
acted as a model.

One of the finest landscape painters of his day, he is mainly associated with pictures of cattle or sheep,[4] a fact that earned him the epithet "Cow Cooper".[7] Cooper collaborated between 1847 and 1870 with Frederick Richard Lee R.A. on several paintings, Lee undertaking the landscapes, and Cooper adding animals to complete the scene.[8] He travelled round the country, sometimes with his son, painting in Wales, Scotland and the Lake District as well as his home county of Kent.

In London he moved in elevated circles, counting many artists, politicians and writers, including Charles Dickens, as his friends. He had a long acquaintanceship with JMW Turner whom he describes in his autobiography as taking a ‘great interest in me and my success’. Cooper also was favoured by Queen Victoria who invited him to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Cooper was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1845 and Royal Academician (RA) on 22 June 1867.[9]

Cooper and Canterbury

Cooper had a long association with his birthplace, Canterbury. At the height of his fame in London he moved back to the city, building a house, Vernon Holme, in Harbledown and living in it until his death in 1902. (The house is now owned by Kent College.) From the first year that he settled in the country, he started breeding his own animals, so that he always had models at hand. He was of the opinion that 'all Landscape painters should live in the country'.

He loved the theatre and in 1856 bought a block of buildings on Guildhall Street and, drawing on his past experiences as a scenery painter, designed a new theatre for Canterbury. His great friend Charles Dickens, who gave a reading there, praised the design saying 'Why Cooper, I have not had to make the slightest effort to send my voice even to the back seats of the gallery'.

Sidney Cooper Gallery Canterbury

He was a great philanthropist in Canterbury, and used some of his wealth to help the poor in the city. In 1868, he purchased the house where he had been born and his mother lived and the block of buildings around it to establish the Sidney Cooper Gallery and Art School, containing a gallery of casts, statues and drawings for students to study. This was partly as a memorial to his mother Sarah (1776-1865) but also to provide free tuition to poorer local students who wished to study art, providing the teaching that was missing during his early years.[10] The school was affiliated with the Science and Art Department in South Kensington led by Henry Cole, the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Amongst Cooper's more well-known students was Mary Tourtel, creator and illustrator of the Rupert Bear books for children.

Students in the Sidney Cooper Gallery 1941

Cooper left both the Gallery and house in Trust to the Canterbury City Council of the day with the condition that it be used for artistic and educational purposes. Since then the space has been through a number of incarnations. Ian Dury of Blockheads fame taught at the school from 1970-1973 when it was known as the Canterbury College of Art. It has since been used by the University for the Creative Arts and Canterbury Christ Church University as a working studio and exhibition space. The Gallery has been empty since 2020 and is in some need of repair.

Legacy

Cooper wrote his reminiscences, under the title of My Life, in 1890. Among many fascinating anecdotes, he recalls fleeing the fighting in Brussels when the Belgian Revolution broke out, his meetings with JMW Turner, with Charles Dickens and his commission by Queen Victoria to paint a prize bull. Thomas and Charlotte had four children; his son, Thomas George Cooper, also became an artist. Twenty years after his first wife died Cooper married Mary Cannon and had a son, Nevill.

The oldest member of the Royal Academy of Arts at the time of the accession of King Edward VII in 1901, Cooper was received by the King in July 1901,[11] and appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO).[12] Painting right until the end of his life, such was his fame that his declining health in 1901 was reported in newspapers, where he was referred to as 'the grand old man of art'. His funeral was at Canterbury Cathedral and he is buried in the graveyard of St Martin's Church, Canterbury. So prolific a painter was he that the studio sale conducted by Christies in 1902 after his death lasted a full three days.

The largest public collection of Cooper paintings is owned by Canterbury City Council and housed at the

Tate Gallery, London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and other public collections, mainly in Britain. The definitive account of his life and catalogue of his work 'Thomas Sidney Cooper - His Life and Work', by Kenneth Westwood was published
in two volumes in 2011 by David Leathers, Ilminster.

Selected paintings

  • Milking Time (1834)[13]
  • A Summer's Noon (1836)
  • A Drover's Halt on the Fells (1838)
  • A Group in the Meadows (1845)
  • Waterloo, the defeat of Kellerman's Cuirassiers (1847)
  • The Shepherd's Sabbath (1866)
  • Milking Time in the Meadows (1869)[14]
  • The Monarch of the Meadows (1873)
  • Separated but not Divorced (1874)
  • Isaac's Substitute (1880)
  • Pushing off for Tilbury Fort (1884)
  • Cattle and Sheep in a Landscape (1888)
  • On a Farm in East Kent (1889)
  • Return to the Farm, Milking Time (1897)[4]

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-0-85345-590-5
    . Retrieved 29 May 2020.
  2. ^ "cooper-ts - Canterbury History". www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk. Archived from the original on 30 November 2020. Retrieved 13 March 2019.
  3. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 81–82.
  4. ^ a b c Chisholm 1911, p. 82.
  5. ^ "Thomas Sidney Cooper - Expert Art Authentication & Attribution Investigations - Research Services | Provenance Scrutiny and Verification | Fake and forgery detection, Paintings analysis and forensics". www.freemanart.ca.
  6. ^ "The Battle of Waterloo, 16–19 June 1815, the Defeat of Kellerman's Cuirassiers". Art UK. Retrieved 3 March 2014.
  7. ^ "Landscape animal oil painting of cattle & sheep at a river by Thomas Sidney Cooper". BADA.
  8. ^ Westwood (2011) Vol. 2 Catalogue pp1-20
  9. ^ "Art and artists - Royal Academy of Arts". www.royalacademy.org.uk. Retrieved 13 March 2019.
  10. ^ "Cooper gallery – Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society".
  11. ^ "Court Circular". The Times. No. 36521. London. 31 July 1901. p. 9.
  12. ^ "No. 27346". The London Gazette. 16 August 1901. p. 5409.
  13. ^ "Milking Time - Study of a Farm-Yard near Canterbury". Tate. Retrieved 13 March 2019.
  14. ^ "Milking Time in the Meadows, 1869". Royal Academy of Arts. Retrieved 30 June 2023.

References

  • Sartin, Stephen (1976). Thomas Sidney Cooper, C.V.O., R.A., 1803-1902. Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis.
  • Westwood, Kenneth J. (2011) Thomas Sidney Cooper C.V.O, R.A. His Life and Work. 2 vols. Barrington, David Leathers Publishing.
• Cooper, Thomas Sidney, My Life, published by R. Bentley, 1890

Attribution:

External links

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