Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/428

 Huxley, Tyndall, Owen, Livingstone and others. In his engravings for Stanley's 'How I found Livingstone' (1872) and 'In Darkest Africa' (1890) he showed remarkable skill and intuition as an interpreter of the hints for landscape, groups of natives, animals or weapons, given in Stanley's rough but suggestive sketches. Among his later work were the engravings for 'Pictures from Shelley' (1892) after designs by Etheline E. Dell.

Cooper lived to see the art of wood-engraving superseded by photographic processes. Owing to this and failing eyesight he retired from active work some years before his death. Jovial and breezy in manner, full of kindness and geniality, the old 'wood-pecker,' as he described himself, died at his residence, Rothesay, North Road, Highgate, on 27 Feb. 1904, and was buried at the Great Northern cemetery. On 20 July 1848 he married Jane Eleanor, daughter of Benjamin Ovington, a clerk in the Bank of England. He had three sons and four daughters. The latter were each awarded in 1905 a civil list pension of 25l.



COOPER, THOMAS SIDNEY (1803–1902), animal painter, was born in St. Peter's Street, Canterbury, on 26 Sept. 1803. His mother was left to bring up her family of two sons and three daughters entirely by her own exertions. After a, very slender school education Cooper was engaged in 1815 by a coach-builder, the uncle of a school friend named William Burgess, to learn and practise coach - painting. As a child he was seen by [q. v.] sketching the cathedral on his slate, and received from him a gift of the first pencils and paper that he used. His sketching of the cathedral was also noticed by Archbishop Manners Sutton, who encouraged him and gave him his first commissions for drawings. He was also helped and instructed by a scene-painter, Doyle, who had noticed him at his work; and as the coach-builder no longer wanted his services, he took seriously to scene-painting, being engaged by the manager of a company which played in Faversham, Folkestone, and Hastings. Returning to Canterbury after the company broke up, he again turned to coach-painting, and between this and occasional work as a scene-painter and draughtsman earned his living until he was twenty.

About 1823 he was invited by an uncle, a dissenting minister named Elvey, to London. He at once got permission to copy in the British Museum, and there made the acquaintance of [q. v.] and [q. v.], then students like himself. He obtained his recommendation to the council of the Royal Academy through, R.A. [q. v.] (no relative), and submitted drawings which secured his admission to the Academy schools at the same time as Smith and Richmond. He also received marked encouragement from Sir Thomas Lawrence. But at this critical moment his uncle proved unable to keep him, and he had no resource but to return to Canterbury. For three or four years he earned a living as a drawing-master in Canterbury, Dover, Margate, and Herne Bay. In 1827 he crossed the Channel with his old school friend Burgess, and by dint of drawing the portraits of his hosts at the various inns on his road managed to pay his way to Brussels. Here he soon secured a large number of pupils, and what was even more fortunate, the friendship of the Belgian animal painter Verboekhoven, who greatly influenced the formation of Cooper's style. But both painters found their chief models in Cuyp and Potter and the Dutch school of the seventeenth century, and made up for the lack of originality by the thoroughness of their methods and the faithfulness of their renderings of nature. Cooper took to painting in oil about this period; hitherto he had done little except water-colour and pencil drawings. Up till the last he was most careful in his use of the pencil in outlining the main features of even his largest paintings in oil.

While in Brussels he also produced two lithographs after pictures in Prince d'Aremberg's collection (Paul Potter and A. van de Velde). Another lithograph (a view of Dover) is dated 1825, while practically all his other drawings on stone were produced before 1840 (e.g. a series of rustic figures, dated 1833, and published by Dickinson in 1834; another similar series published by F. G. Moon in 1837; a series illustrating hop-growing; studies of cattle, two series, published by S. and J. Fuller, about 1835 and 1837; thirty-four subjects of cattle, published by T. McLean in 1837; groups of cattle drawn from nature, twenty-six lithographs, published by Ackerman, 1839).

He also did a large line-engraving after Landseer (interior of a Scottish cotter's home), which does not seem to have been