Astley David Middleton Cooper

Astley David Middleton Cooper (American, 1856-1924).

This work is offered framed.

A.D.M. Cooper specialized in Native American genre painting and other scenes of the vanishing west as well as figural works and landscapes of the Western states.

Cooper was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and George Catlin, the explorer and early painter of Plains Indian life, was a family friend. His paintings and stories inspired Cooper's lifelong fascination with Native Americans. After studying art at Washington University, Cooper made his own explorations through western territories, living with Indians and recording his experiences in drawings and paintings. He spent two years in Boulder, Colorado, drawing for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and making easel paintings of Indian subjects and western landscapes. At age 24, Cooper moved to San Francisco and adopted the life of a bohemian artist, setting up his first studio in the city's Latin Quarter. His reputation grew quickly and, by the early 1880's. he was selling his paintings in the eastern United States and in Europe.

Cooper moved to San Jose, California, in 1883, eventually building an elaborate studio in the Egyptian style. His contemporaries considered him one of the most important artists in California and his paintings were purchased or commissioned by members of the California aristocracy, including Mrs. Leland Stanford. Cooper's canvases commanded high prices, and one large canvas, Trilby, named after a Du Maurier novel, is said to have sold for $62,000 in the 1890s.

Throughout his career, Cooper painted scenes of the frontier and Native life, especially Plains Indian encampments and buffalo hunts. He decried Federal policies toward the Indians and, like many artists of the time, he felt an urgency to capture the ways of a "vanishing race." However, Cooper's paintings were by no means intended as literal documents of specific people and places. They were, instead, romantic visions intended to elicit favorable emotions about the mythology, and the passing, of the "noble Indian."

Cooper heightened the romantic mood of his works with dramatic chiaroscuro and atmospheric effects that often obscured the background of the view, focusing attention on the carefully drawn subjects while downplaying their context. His technique was similar to tonalism, but most of his paintings cannot be classed as such because they are often full of movement and activity. In his later years, Cooper increasingly painted landscapes, allegories, and historical subjects. His brushwork loosened, and some of the allegorical paintings, in particular, have an impressionist quality. We are pleased to offer a gentle lake landscape, painted when the artist was twenty-three.

Signed 'A.D. Cooper' lower left; dated 1879