Lot 854 THOMAS SIDNEY COOPER RA (1803 - 1902)
Title: Grazing Stock, Cumberland (C. 1836 - 1840)
Medium: Oil on Panel
Signature: Unsigned; Inscribed Verso
Provenance: Sophia H. Cator;
B.W. Vernon (A Gift from the above);
Bonhams, London, 24 June 1998, Lot 63;
Henry H. Walrond, Merrior, Somerset;
Bonhams, Bath, 7 April 2003, Lot 109;
Private Collection, Hampstead, UK;
Private Collection
Exhibited: Liverpool Academy, 1840, No. 95
Literature: Stephen Sartin, Thomas Sidney Cooper, CVO, RA 1803 - 1902, Pg 61, No. 41
(as Girls Herding Cattle);
Kenneth J. Westwood, Thomas Sidney Cooper, His Life and Work, London,
2011, Pg 213, No. 0.1840.8
Notes: According to Kenneth J. Westwood, this unsigned work was most probably a compositional oil sketch for a larger painting, possibly the study for “ A Drover’s Halt on the Fells, Cumberland†which was exhibited at the Royal Academy 1838, catalogue no. 385.
Framed
Born in Canterbury, Thomas Sidney Cooper was one of the most popular painters of animals in nineteenth-century Britain. Entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1827, aged twenty, he went on to became a teacher in Brussels, and a friend of the Belgian animal painter Verboeckhoven, who influenced his style. In 1831 Cooper settled in London and over the following years exhibited forty-eight paintings at the British Institution, and over two hundred at the Royal Academy. He was a significant benefactor to the town where he was born, and gifted a handsome purpose-built art gallery and art school to Canterbury, as well as a theatre. In his autobiography My Life, Cooper describes his first visit to Cumberland, which took place in 1836: “From Yorkshire I went to Cumberland, amongst the fells, a part of England I had long desired to visit. . . I got some splendid subjects, and made a considerable number of good and useful studies of landscapes,introducing cattle and figures. The Scotch drovers, coming south with their droves of cattle, generally passed over these fells to avoid the tolls, and often halted there for a night, sometimes even for a longer time. They were very glad when the people from the towns and villages went up and milked their cows and ewes, and when, in exchange for the milk, which they were pleased to get, they gave food, and gin, and beer.” Cooper made many sketches of the drovers, their collie, and their cows and ewes, in preparation for his ‘next large picture’. The present work, Grazing Stock, Cumberland ties in closely with the scene as described by Cooper, of drovers halting with their cattle and sheep on their way south, while women from local villages come to milk the animals. In Cooper’s painting, two drovers, wearing sheepskin wraps, with one mounted on a white horse,are visible on the left of the composition, beyond the sheepdog. In the distance can be seen the Cumbrian mountains. In his memoirs, Cooper goes on to describe an important painting that resulted from his visit to Cumberland, titled A Drover’s Halt on the Fells, Cumberland (Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport). The present work is likely to be a painting in which Cooper worked out different approaches in composition, in preparation for his masterpiece A Drover’s Halt on the Fells, Cumberland which attracted praise when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838. Dr. Peter Murray, May 2026
€3000 - 5000
Image: 29.5 x 44.5cm (approx) Framed: 41.5 x 56.5cm (approx.)
Wednesday 20th May 2026
12:50:52
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