Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/303

 COPE.

buildings of his native city and the country around it^ and gained a precarious income by selling his drawings to strangers. At the age of seventeen he became painter at the Hastings Theatre, and for three years grained a moderate in- come by scene-painting. Then he became a drawing-master at Canter- bury till the year 1827, when a French gentleman coming to that city to teach drawing, he lost all his connection. He had studied, as often as opportunity presented, at the British Museum, in the Angerstein Gallery, and at the Royal Academy. In 1827 he set out from Dover to Calais, and literally " sketched his way " from that French port to the Belgian capital ; paying tavem-bUls by likenesses of hosts and hostesses. At Brussels his talents secured him patrons and employment ; and hav- ing settled there, he married, and enjoyed the friendship of various Flemish artists. There, too, his pencil was first directed to the study of landscape, and the branch of art (animal-painting) which se- cured him his present high reputa- tion, with abundant and profitable employment. The revolution of 1830 involved him and his family in difficulties, and forced him to rethim to England. He first ex- hibited in the Suffolk Street (Gal- lery in 1833. His picture attracted attention, and he received a com- mission from Mr. Vernon for a pic- ture now in the Vernon Gallery. About ten years later his Cuyp-like groups of cattle "Going to Pas- ture, "Watering at Evening," " Beposing," in the heat of a sum- mer afternoon, attracted general notice on the walls of the Aca- demy. From the time of the ex- hibition of his first picture in the Suffolk Street Gallery in 1888, Mr. Cooper's success has been uniform ; and from the period when Mr Ver- non purchased the picture before alluded to, he has not had a picture uasold. Mr. Cooper was elected an

Associate of the Boyal Academy in 1845, and a Boyal Academician in 1867. In 1882 he presented to the city of Canterbury the Gallery of Art which he had founded some ten or twelve years previously, and in which he had since given gratui- tous instructions to students. A condition made by the donor was that only a nominal fee should be charged to the artisan classes for tuition; the original object for which the gallery was built having been the teaching of drawing to poor boys. At the meeting at which Mr. Cooper's gift was an- nounced it was determined to con- vert the gallery into a school, and to affiliate it to the Science and Art Dei>artment at South Kensington. Mr. Cooper stated that he had stipu- lated in his will that the last work on which he should be engaged at the time of his decease, together with his palette and brush, should be brought to the gallery and kept there.

COPE, Chables West, E.A., painter, born in Leeds in 1811, is the son of an artist of considerable reputation in that town, whose career was cut short by an untimely death. After a course of study « first under Mr. Sase, and then at the Boyal Academy, he resided for two years in Italy. After his re- turn to England, he attracted much notice by a " Holy Family," which was purchased by the late Mr. Beck- ford. Among his earlier pictures one which attracted considerable attention at the Boyal Academy Exhibition in 1839 was a large altar-piece, subsequently presented by him to St. George's Church at Leeds, where it now stands as a memorial of the painter in the town of his birth. Mr. Cope is one of the fortunate few whose progpreas to a high position has been aseosted by the favourable decisions of the Boyal Commission on the Fine Arts. He first exhibited at the Boyal Academy in 1831. His earlier pic- tures may be divided into two die*