Thomas Sidney Cooper

Thomas Sidney Cooper CVO RA (26 September 1803 – 7 February 1902) was an English landscape painter from Canterbury, noted for his images of cattle and farm animals.

In 1827 he and friend went to Brussels and through some luck and perseverance, Cooper started to make a living through painting portraits and also becoming a drawing master.

[6] When the competition was announced for the decoration for the new Houses of Parliament, to be held at Westminster Hall in 1847, Cooper submitted The Defeat of Kellermann's Cuirassiers and Carabiniers by Somerset's Cavalry Brigade at Waterloo, June 18, 1815, without success.

One of the finest landscape painters of his day, he is mainly associated with pictures of cattle or sheep,[5] a fact that earned him the epithet "Cow Cooper".

At the height of his fame in London he moved back to the city, building a house, Vernon Holme, in Harbledown and living in it until his death in 1902.

His great friend Charles Dickens, who gave a reading there, praised the design saying 'Why Cooper, I have not had to make the slightest effort to send my voice even to the back seats of the gallery'.

The school was affiliated with the Science and Art Department in South Kensington led by Henry Cole, the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Cooper left both the Gallery and house in Trust to the Canterbury City Council of the day with the condition that it be used for artistic and educational purposes.

Among many fascinating anecdotes, he recalls fleeing the fighting in Brussels when the Belgian Revolution broke out, his meetings with JMW Turner, with Charles Dickens and his commission by Queen Victoria to paint a prize bull.

[13] Painting right until the end of his life, such was his fame that his declining health in 1901 was reported in newspapers, where he was referred to as 'the grand old man of art'.