George Cooke (painter)

Infobox Artist
name = George Cooke


imagesize =
caption =
birthname =
birthdate = 1793
location = Maryland
deathdate = 1849
deathplace = New Orleans
nationality = American
field = Primarily portrait painting
training =
movement =
works =
patrons = Daniel Pratt
influenced by =
influenced =
awards =

George Cooke (1793 – 1849) was an itinerant United States painter who specialized in portrait and landscape paintings and was one of the South's best known painters of the mid nineteenth century.cite web |url= http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-971 |title= George Cooke (1793-1849) |accessdate=2008-02-06 |publisher= Georgia Humanities Council] His primary patron was the industrialist Daniel Pratt, who built a gallery in Prattville, Alabama solely to house Cooke's paintings.

Early career and fame

Born in Maryland, Cooke abandoned a fledgling career in business at an early age in order to become a full time artist. After several years of painting portraits for a living, Cooke left for what would become a five year tour of Europe. His time there was mostly spent learning from and copying the works of the Renaissance master artists, with many of Cooke's copies being sent back to the United States for show or sale.cite journal |url= http://www.etsu.edu/writing/odonnell/cooke.htm |last= O'Donnell |first= Kevin E. |title= The Artist in the Garden: George Cooke (1793-1849) and the Ideology of Fine Arts Painting in Antebellum Georgia |journal= Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual |pages= 73–97 |date= 2004]

After returning to the U.S., Cooke and his wife spent the next decade traveling and working with no fixed home. His work took him throughout the Southern United States, where he primarily made his living painting portraits of both famous and ordinary people, and, by the 1840s, his portraits had earned him both financial success and regional fame.

Daniel Pratt's patronage

In 1844 in New Orleans, Cooke started what would become his most important professional relationship when he met Alabama industrialist Daniel Pratt. Pratt was immediately drawn to Cooke's work, and decided to give the artist two floors in one of his warehouses for Cooke to use as a gallery and studio. After a few years, Pratt decided to take the unusual step of adding a separate gallery to his home in Prattville, Alabama, solely to house Cooke's art. Pratt also commissioned Cooke to paint what would become his best known work, the "Interior of St. Peter's Rome", a giant painting based on a smaller piece that Cooke had previously painted during his travels in Europe. In 1867, Pratt donated "Interior of St. Peter's Rome" to the University of Georgia, where it still hangs today in the University's chapel. At 17 by 23.5 feet, the work was said to be the largest framed oil painting in the world at the time of its donation, [cite web |url= http://chapel.myweb.uga.edu/painting.html |title= Painting and Restoration |accessdate=2008-02-06 |publisher= University of Georgia] and it still ranks among the world's largest.

Death and the dispersal of his work

George Cooke's health had never been very good, and in 1849 in New Orleans, he contracted cholera and died rapidly of the illness.

Nearly twenty years after his death, the gallery in Pratville was found to be infested with dry rot and had to be torn down to prevent the rot from spreading. As a result, all of Cooke's work housed at the gallery wound up being destroyed or dispersed. It was this threat that prompted Daniel Pratt to donate "Interior of St. Peter's Rome" to the University of Georgia.

References