Edward Cooper (publisher)

[2] By this time, Cooper was already employing the mezzotint engraver John Smith and cultivating works by leading portrait painters, notably Willem Wissing, Frederick Kerseboom, Godfrey Kneller, and, soon after, Michael Dahl.

He also published contemporary landscapes, still lifes, and genre subjects by Robert Robinson, Bernard Lens II, and Jan van der Vaart, and old master paintings, undertaking such important initiatives as a 1707 set of mezzotints made by John Simon after the Raphael Cartoons in Hampton Court Palace.

He also reissued some old plates, including a set of twenty-five Birds and Beasts, after Francis Barlow, later stolen during the view of the sale that followed his death.

[1] Beside from prints, Cooper also sold paintings and artists' materials, and was widely acknowledged among England's leading connoisseurs.

After at least four decades of activity, Cooper decided to retire from business in 1723, which was signaled by the advertisement for a sale published in The Daily Courant on 2 December 1723.