Colin Campbell Cooper

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Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. (March 8, 1856 – November 6, 1937) was an American Impressionist painter, perhaps best known for his skyscrapers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

He was also known for his paintings of European and Asian landmarks, as well as natural landscapes, portraits, florals, and interiors.

He was not limited to being a painter, but also a teacher and writer.

Emma Lampert Cooper, his first wife, was also regarded as a highly respected painter.

Background and education

Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1856, into a well-to-do family of English-Irish descent. He had four older and four younger siblings. Emily Williams Cooper, Cooper, whose ancestor immigrated to the United States from Weymouth, England, was an amateur painter in watercolors. Dr. Colin Campbell Cooper, whose grandfather came from Derry, Ireland, was a surgeon and a lawyer with a passion for the arts. When he attended the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, young Colin was inspired by the art he discovered. Both of his parents were extremely supportive of his aspirations, encouraging him to become an artist.

Cooper studied art under the guidance of famed realist painter Thomas Eakins for three years in Philadelphia in 1879. In 1886, he started traveling to foreign countries for the first time, visiting the Netherlands, Belgium, and Brittany. Henri Lucien Doucet, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jules Joseph Lefebvre all returned to Paris from 1886 to 1890, with Henri Lucien Doucet, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. He has also worked at Académie Delécluse and Académie Vitti. This period was mainly composed of landscapes painted in a Barbizon style. He travelled extensively throughout his life, sketching and painting scenes of Europe, Asia, and the United States in watercolors and oils.

Life and work

Cooper taught watercolor classes and architectural rendering at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1895 to 1898. Several of Cooper's paintings were destroyed in an 1896 fire at Hazeltine Galleries in Philadelphia; as a result, only a small amount of his early work exists today.

While studying at Drexel, he spent his summers abroad, mostly in Laren's Dutch artists colony in North Holland and Dordrecht, South Holland. Emma Lampert (1855-1920), a celebrated painter from Rochester, New York, was one of the other artists in Dordrecht at this time. On June 9, 1897, she and Cooper met in Rochester and were soon married.

The Coopers returned to Europe for a few years in 1898. He developed the Impressionist style, which he continued to use for the remainder of his artistic career during this period as Cooper painted architectural landmarks.

Both Cooper and his wife appeared in numerous two-person shows together, including a May 1902 exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Gallery in Rochester and a 1915 show at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. They migrated from 1904 to New York City, where they would remain, other than their many travels, until 1921. Here he continued his work, which he had begun about two years ago in Philadelphia, on his famous skyscraper paintings. Cooper said he was "particularly interested in the skyscraper buildings in Broad Street." It was fascinating to see the freakishness dismantle from those queer towering structures in the glamor of the right kind of light. He said that the painting that gave him his first success was 1902's Broad Street, New York; in 1903, this work was honoured with the W. T. Evans Award of the New York Watercolor Club; In another interview, he had stated that "one of the things that most strikes me about this view up Broad Street is the drastic contrast between the old, low type of buildings" and the great skyscrapers. These images were created for these contrasts.

Cooper, the artist who best captured modern, towering buildings on canvas in 1911, was named "the skyscraper artist par excellence of America" by The New York Times, citing Cooper as the artist who best captured modern, towering structures on canvas. He was "one of the most interesting figures in American art" in an essay the following year, reiterating that "in his special field, he has no superior." His paintings often depict skyscrapers in Philadelphia and Chicago, in comparison to New York City.

The French government purchased Cooper's painting Fifth Avenue, New York for the Musée du Luxembourg. For an American artist, such an award was very unusual. Critics of the period and up to date have often compared Cooper and Childe Hassam's works. They have been credited as the two most influential artists whose paintings sparked a movement of celebrating the wonders of the modern world, particularly New York City. Cooper may have deliberately avoided certain topics in order to distinguish himself from Hassam. Hassam, unlike Cooper, did not concentrate on the tall buildings in his cityscapes.

As well as oils, Cooper was as proficient at painting in watercolors as he was in oils. He would often create a small watercolor study before starting a larger work in oils. But the smaller watercolors were not simply sketches for his own use; they were finished works that he exhibited many years before the larger corresponding oil paintings that he would eventually produce. Cooper was elected to a coveted membership in the National Academy of Design in 1912 (he had previously been elected an Associate four years earlier).

During the RMS Carpathia's rescue mission for the survivors of the sunken RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, he and his wife were aboard the RMS Carpathia. He was involved in the mission and created several paintings describing the events. The Coopers gave up their ship's cabin in order to sleep in berths.

Cooper was on display in San Francisco's Panama–Pacific International Exposition of 1915, winning the gold medal for oil and the silver medal for watercolor. While he was there, he created a series of paintings depicting the exhibit's buildings, including the Palace of Fine Arts. In 1916, he appeared in the Panama–California Exposition in San Diego. In Los Angeles, the Coopers lived from 1915 to 1916. Cooper's later decision to move to southern California was unquestionably a key factor in his decision to move permanently. Emma, his wife, died of tuberculosis on July 30, 1920.

Cooper moved to Santa Barbara, California, in January 1921, after his wife's death. Santa Barbara will be his home base for the remainder of his life after two years in northern Europe and Tunisia. At the Santa Barbara Community School of Arts, he was Dean of Paintings.

Cooper related to his new locale: "I find Santa Barbara so close to the things a painter so much likes: climate, flowers, mountains, seascapes, etc." I am compensated for America's "intuitive universe" with a community interest in all sorts of artistic fields, to a degree. But he hadn't abandoned America's "artistic universe," New York City, as he continued to operate a studio there for ten years after his move to California.

Another facet of his creativity emerged in the mid-1920s, perhaps inspired by his father's great love of literature, he began writing plays and books. His plays made their way in the 1920s and 1930s to theater companies in Pasadena, Redlands, and Santa Fe, and they were also produced at The Strollers, a theater company founded in Santa Barbara. In addition to the dramatic performances, he also wrote books, illustrated books, and an autobiography titled In These Old Days.

Marie Henriette Frehsee, his second wife, married him in Arizona in April 1927. Cooper continued to love traveling and painted until he was forbidden from doing so due to poor vision in his last years. He died in Santa Barbara on November 6, 1937, at the age of 81. He is buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. The Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery in 1938 in Santa Barbara paid tribute to Cooper's legacy by staging a memorial exhibition of his work.

Cooper initiated the attempt to turn the abandoned post office building into an art museum in a letter sent by the Santa Barbara News-Press editor in July 1937. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened just four years ago.

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