Douglas Cooper (art historian)

(Arthur William) Douglas Cooper, who also published as Douglas Lord (20 February 1911 – 1 April 1984) was a British art historian, art critic and art collector. He mainly collected Cubist works.

Early in the 19th century, Cooper's forebears had emigrated to Australia and acquired great wealth, in particular property in Sydney. His great-grandfather Daniel Cooper became a member of the New South Wales legislature and was the first Speaker of the new Legislative Assembly in 1856. He was made a baronet in 1863 and spent his time both in Australia and England, eventually settling permanently in England, and dying in London. His son and grandson also lived there and sold their Australian property in the 1920s, very much to Douglas's annoyance.

Douglas's mother came from old-established English aristocracy. His biographer and longtime partner John Richardson considered his suffering from the social exclusion of his family by his countrymen to be a defining characteristic of his friend,clarify explaining in particular his Anglophobia. Cooper never visited Australia and proposed that he might have been conceived there during the honeymoon of his parents.

As a teenager, his erudite uncle Gerald Cooper took him on a trip to Monte Carlo, where Cooper saw the Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company; his biographer traces an arc from here to Cooper's late work Picasso et le Théatre. He went to Repton School and Trinity College, Cambridge graduating in 1930 with a third in the French section and a second (division 2) in the French section of the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos. When he was 21, he inherited £100,000 (then about US $500,000, a significant fortune), enabling him to study art history at the Sorbonne, in Paris and at the University of Freiburg in Germany, which was not possible at the time in Cambridge.

...
Wikipedia