Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery; Manchester Art Gallery; Glasgow Art Gallery; Canterbury, Royal Museum (Beaney Institute); Canterbury, Sidney Cooper School of Art; public galleries at Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. Two pictures are in the royal collection, the 'Pasture, Osborne' (done at Queen Victoria's invitation in 1848), and 'Carisbrook Castle' (painted in 1837, and presented by the artist to the Queen in 1887).
The following are some of his pictures that have been engraved: 'Milking Time' (R.A. 1834; Vernon Coll., Nat. Gall.; engraved by J. Godfrey); 'Cattle, Morning' (R.A. 1847; Vernon Coll., Nat. Gall.; engraved by J. Cousen); 'The Pasture, Osborne' (1848, Royal Collection; engraved by C. Cousen); 'Goatherd of Snowdon' (mezzotint by J. Harris, 1850); 'Kentish Farmyard' (mezzotint by R. B. Parkes, 1864); 'The Sheep Farm' (mixed mezzotint by C. C. Hollyer, 1872); 'Summer Evening' (mixed mezzotint by H. Sedcole, 1903); 'Landscape and Cattle' (1855, reproduced in 'Pictures in the Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan,' 1907).
He married (1) on 1 Oct. 1829, Charlotte Pearson (d. 1842), the daughter of an English resident in Brussels, having issue three daughters and one son, Thomas George (1835-1901), who followed his father as an animal painter, and exhibited at the British Institution and Royal Academy 1861-96; (2) in 1863, Mary, daughter of W. Cameron of Canterbury, and had issue Neville Louis (&. 1864). The following oil portraits are known: (1) by himself, 1832; (2) by Walter Scott, 1841; (3) by W. W. Ouless, R.A., 1889 (all three in the collection of Mr. Neville Cooper); (4) another by Walter Scott, 1841 (exhibited R.A. 1842), was formerly in the possession of his daughter Lucy (Mrs. Coxon), and now belongs to his grand-daughter, Mrs. Alfred Earle. Thomas George Cooper exhibited an etched portrait of his father at the Royal Academy in 1884.
[My Life, by T. Sidney Cooper, 2 vols., 1890; Graves, Royal Acad. Exhibitors, and Exhibitors at the British Institution; Lists of the Printsellers' Association; The Times, 8 Feb. 1902; information supplied by Mr. Neville Cooper.]
COOPER, THOMPSON (1837–1904), biographer and journalist, born at Cambridge on 8 Jan. 1837, was eldest son of Charles Henry Cooper [q. v.] the Cambridge antiquary, by his wife Jane, youngest daughter of John Thompson of Prickwillow, Cambridgeshire.
A younger brother, John William Cooper (1845-1906), graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, LL.B. in 1866, LL.M. in 1869, and LL.D. in 1880; was called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn in 1868, but resided in Cambridge almost all his life, taking a prominent part in municipal affairs, becoming revising barrister for the county, and acting as local correspondent for 'The Times'; he died at Cambridge on 10 Nov. 1906. He added a fifth: volume (posthumously published, 1908) to his father's 'Annals of Cambridge,' and revised the four previous volumes of the work.
Thompson Cooper, educated at a private school kept at Cambridge by the Rev. John Orman, was articled to his father, who became a solicitor in 1840, and was admitted in due time to the profession. But the law was only nominally his vocation, and he took no part in his father's considerable business. His real inheritance was a love of biographical and antiquarian research. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries at the early age of 23, and never ceased, while he lived, to investigate antiquarian bye-ways of literature.
Biography was his principal interest. Cooper collected, while still a boy, materials for a work that should rival the 'Athenaæ Oxonienses' of Anthony à Wood. His father joined in the project, with the result that in 1858 appeared the first volume of 'Athenæ Cantabrigienses,' containing memoirs of the authors and other eminent men, being alumni of Cambridge, who died between 1500 and 1585. A second volume, published in 1861, carried the work forward to 1609. A part of the third volume was printed, but not published, when the father died in 1866; and, though the university offered to defray the cost of printing the manuscript, neither Thompson Cooper nor his younger brother, John William Cooper, [see above] had leisure to complete the undertaking.
From 1861 onwards Cooper was a working journalist, his first engagement being that of a sub-editor of the 'Daily Telegraph.' In 1862 he became a parliamentary reporter of that paper. He had learned shorthand, the Mason-Gurney system, and, besides putting it to practical purposes, published a manual of the system, 'Parliamentary Shorthand,' as early as 1858. Later, he became a recognised authority on the history of the art. A long connection with 'The Times' began in 1866, and ended only
