Colin Campbell Cooper · 1856–1937

Colin Campbell Cooper: a biography

Philadelphia-born and trained under Thomas Eakins, Colin Campbell Cooper became America's leading painter of the skyscraper city and, in his last sixteen years, a central figure in the art life of Santa Barbara.

Philadelphia and Paris

Cooper was born in Philadelphia on March 8, 1856. His father was a surgeon and his mother an amateur watercolorist, and visiting the 1876 Centennial Exposition in his home city turned him toward art. In 1879 he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, studying with Thomas Eakins for three years. After travels in the Netherlands, Belgium and Brittany in 1886, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1886 to 1890, and also at the Académie Delécluse and the Académie Vitti.

Drexel, Emma Lampert and early losses

Back in Philadelphia he taught watercolor and architectural rendering at the Drexel Institute from 1895 to 1898. A fire at the Hazeltine Galleries in 1896 destroyed many of his paintings, so relatively little early work survives. Summers in Holland introduced him to the painter Emma Lampert of Rochester, New York; they married in Rochester on June 9, 1897, and often exhibited together. Painting architecture in Europe around 1898 to 1902, he developed the Impressionist manner he kept for the rest of his career.

New York and the skyscraper

The Coopers moved to New York in 1904. His Broad Street, New York of 1902 won the New York Watercolor Club's W. T. Evans award in 1903, and in 1911 The New York Times called him "the skyscraper artist par excellence of America." He also painted Philadelphia and Chicago, and his Fifth Avenue, New York was bought by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1912. That April the Coopers were aboard the RMS Carpathia when it rescued survivors of the Titanic, and he painted scenes of the rescue.

California

At San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 Cooper won a gold medal for oil and a silver medal for watercolor, and painted the fair's buildings, including the Palace of Fine Arts. He showed at San Diego's Panama-California Exposition in 1916 and spent the winter of 1915–16 in Los Angeles. Emma died in July 1920, and in January 1921 he moved to Santa Barbara, where he became Dean of Painting at the Santa Barbara Community School of Arts while keeping a New York studio for another decade.

Santa Barbara years and legacy

In Santa Barbara Cooper painted gardens, missions, mountains and the coast, travelled to northern Europe and Tunisia, wrote plays, novels and an autobiography, In These Old Days, and in 1927 married Marie Henriette Frehsee. In July 1937 he wrote to the Santa Barbara News-Press proposing that the old post office become an art museum, the start of the effort that produced the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He died in Santa Barbara on November 6, 1937. A 2006 retrospective, organized by the Heckscher Museum of Art, travelled to the Laguna Art Museum in 2007.

Thinking of selling a Cooper? See how Steven Stern Fine Arts can help.

Sources

Written for colincampbellcooper.com; facts were checked against the sources below.

1. Wikipedia, "Colin Campbell Cooper." en.wikipedia.org (accessed October 2026).
2. Steven Stern Fine Arts, "Colin Campbell Cooper" artist page. californiapaintings.com (accessed October 2026).
3. William H. Gerdts and Deborah Epstein Solon, East Coast/West Coast and Beyond: Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist, 2006.