George Cooke (painter)
| George Cooke | |
|---|---|
| Born |
George Esten Cooke 1793 St. Mary's County, Maryland |
| Died | 1849 (aged 55–56) New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Primarily portrait painting |
| Patron(s) | Daniel Pratt |
George Esten 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. His primary patron was the industrialist Daniel Pratt, who built a gallery in Prattville, Alabama solely to house Cooke's paintings.
Born in St. Mary's County, 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.
At some time between 1826 and 1830, he made a copy in Paris of The Raft of the Medusa, a monumental painting by Théodore Géricault depicting a notorious incident following a shipwreck. Cooke's smaller version (4' x 6') was shown in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C, to crowds, who knew about the controversy surrounding subject. Reviews favoured the painting, which also stimulated plays, poems, performances and a children's book. It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible, until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, professor of art history at the University of Delaware. The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work.
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.
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