Colin Campbell Cooper

Cooper was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1856, into a well-to-do family of English-Irish heritage. He had four older and four younger siblings. His mother, Emily Williams Cooper, whose ancestor emigrated to the U.S. from Weymouth, England, was an amateur painter in watercolors. His father, Dr. Colin Campbell Cooper, whose grandfather came from Derry, Ireland, was a surgeon and a lawyer with a great appreciation for the arts. Young Colin had been inspired by the art which he discovered when he attended the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Both of his parents were highly supportive of his ambitions and encouraged him to become an artist. In 1879, Cooper enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and studied art under Thomas Eakins for three years. In 1886, he traveled to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Brittany. Afterwards, his art education resumed at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1886 to 1890, with Henri Lucien Doucet, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. He also studied at Académie Delécluse and Académie Vitti. His work of this period consisted mostly of landscapes painted in a Barbizon manner. He traveled extensively throughout his life, sketching and painting scenes of Europe, Asia, and the United States in watercolors and oils. ==Career==

Philadelphia and New York City in Sacramento, California Back in Philadelphia, Cooper taught watercolor classes and architectural rendering at Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) from 1895 to 1898. Many of Cooper's paintings were destroyed in an 1896 fire at Philadelphia's Hazeltine Galleries; as a result, relatively little of his early work exists today. While at Drexel, he spent his summers abroad, primarily in the Dutch artists colony of Laren in North Holland and in Dordrecht in South Holland. Among the other artists in Dordrecht at this time was renowned painter Emma Lampert (1855–1920) from Rochester, New York. She and Cooper met, and were soon married, in Rochester on June 9, 1897. In 1898, the Coopers returned to Europe for a few years. During this period, as Cooper painted architectural landmarks, he developed the Impressionist style which he used for the rest of his artistic career. Cooper and his wife exhibited together in several two-person shows, including a May 1902 exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Club and a 1915 show at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. They moved in 1904 to New York City, where he would remain, other than his many travels, until 1921. Here he continued work, which he had begun about two years earlier in Philadelphia, on his famous skyscraper paintings. Cooper said that he was "greatly interested in the skyscraper buildings in Broad Street. It was intensely interesting to watch the freakishness disappear from those queer towering structures in the glory of the right kind of light". He said that the painting which first brought him great success was 1902's Broad Street, New York; in 1903, this painting was honored with the W. T. Evans Award ==Legacy==

In 1938 Santa Barbara's Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery paid tribute to Cooper's legacy by presenting a memorial exhibition of his work. Several months before his death, Cooper initiated the effort to convert the abandoned post office building into an art museum in a letter to the editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press in July 1937. Four years later that effort materialized into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. ==Exhibitions==

Selected solo exhibitions • 1924-1925 Fine Arts Gallery, San Diego Museum of Art • 1925 Stendahl Art Galleries (Los Angeles, CA) • 1927 Ainslie Galleries (Los Angeles, CA) • 1927 Friday Morning Club (Los Angeles, CA) • 1934 Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA) • 1938 Memorial Exhibition, Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA) • 1981 An Exhibition of Paintings by Colin Campbell Cooper, James M. Hansen, (Santa Barbara, CA) • 2002 Colin Campbell Cooper: Impressions of New York, Santa Barbara Museum of Art • 2003: Sullivan Goss Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA) • 2006 East Coast/West Coast and Beyond: Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist, retrospective; originated at Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, New York), traveled to Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA) in 2007. • 2010 Santa Barbara Historical Museum (Santa Barbara, CA) • 2018 "Landmark", Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA) Selected group exhibitions • 1895, 1897, 1899, 1901–16, 1919, 1920 Art Institute of Chicago • 1901–03, 1907, 1908, 1912 Carnegie Institute Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) • 1902 Galleries of the ART Club (New York) • 1903 Klackner Galleries (New York) • 1907, 1909, 1911, 1913, 1915, 1917, 1920 Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) • 1907–10, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1919, 1922 City Art Museum of St. Louis • 1912 The Macdowell Club of New York • 1915 Arlington Art Galleries (New York) • 1915 Macbeth Gallery (New York) • 1916 O'Brien Gallery (Chicago) • 1916 Cleveland Museum of Art • 1924 Casa de la Guerra (Santa Barbara) • 1927 Biltmore Galleries (Santa Barbara) • 1929 Jules Kievits Fine Art (Pasadena) • 1930 Art Club of Philadelphia • 1930, 1931 New York Society of Painters • 1930, 1931, 1941 County National Bank and Trust (Santa Barbara) • 1932 National Arts Club (New York) • 1933 Ebell Salon of Art (Los Angeles) • 1939, 1941, 1944, 1951 Santa Barbara Museum of Art ==Collections==

Cooper's work is in many prominent collections, including: • Allentown Art Museum (Allentown, Pennsylvania) • Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) • Brooklyn Museum of Art • Cincinnati Museum of Art • Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California) • Dallas Museum of Art • Fleischer Museum (Scottsdale, Arizona) • Irvine Museum (Irvine, California) • Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, New Jersey) • Lowe Art Museum, (Coral Gables, Florida) • Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, New York) • Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) • Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, New Jersey) • Musée du Luxembourg (Paris, France) • Musée National de la Cooperation Franco-Americaine (Blerancourt, France) • Museum of the National Academy of Design (New York City) • National Arts Club (New York City) • National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) • National Museum of Wildlife Art (Jackson Hole, Wyoming) • New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut) • New York Historical Society • Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida) • Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California) • Palais de Tokyo (Ancien National D'art Moderne) (Paris, France) • Payne Gallery, Moravian College (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) • Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts • Philadelphia Museum of Art • Reading Public Museum (Reading, Pennsylvania) • Saint Louis Museum of Fine Arts • San Antonio Art League Museum • San Diego Museum of Art • Santa Barbara Museum of Art • Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art (Dover, Delaware) • University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan) • Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, Pennsylvania) • The White House (Washington, D.C.) ==Gallery==

File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Spanish Garden.jpg|Spanish Garden, c. 1890s–1910s File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Stairway of Francis I at Blois.jpg|Stairway of Francis I at Blois, 1900 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Adam and Eve Inn, Lincoln, England.jpg|Adam and Eve Inn, Lincoln, England, 1902 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Fifth Avenue, New York City.jpg|Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1906 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Main Street Bridge, Rochester.jpg|Main Street Bridge, Rochester, 1908 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street).jpg|Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street), c. 1909 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Metropolitan Life Tower.jpg|Metropolitan Life Tower, 1910 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Polar Bear (1912).jpg|Polar Bear, 1912 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Rooftops at Sunset.jpg|Rooftops at Sunset, 1912 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, St. Philips Church, Charleston.jpg|St. Philips Church, Charleston, c. 1913 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Taj Mahal, Afternoon.jpg|Taj Mahal, Afternoon, 1913 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, At Edgartown, Martha's Vinyard.jpg|''At Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard'', 1915 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Hunter College, New York City.jpg|Hunter College, New York City, c. 1915 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Fortune Teller.jpg|Fortune Teller, 1921 File:WLA nyhistorical Cooper Chambers Street and the Municipal Building.jpg|Chambers Street and the Municipal Building, N.Y.C., 1922 File:Colin Campbell Cooper, Self-Portrait.jpg|Self-Portrait, c. 1922 ==References==