Two artists of The Lakes: Julian Cooper (b 1947) and Edward H Thompson (1879–1949)
Julian Cooper, The Art of Julian Cooper
Foreword by Melvin Bragg, Introduction by Andrew Lambirth
Unicorn Publishing, Lewes, 2026, 304 pp, £40, col ISBN97-1-917458-57-3
Cover image, Coniston Quarry 2 by Julian Cooper (1947–), 2015–2017.
Oil on canvas, 244 x 178 cm. Private collection
Charles Nugent, Edward H. Thompson, The Lake District’s Most Prolific Painter
Charles Nugent, Acton Bridge, Cheshire 2025
164 pp, col & bw, £30 ISBN 978-1-3999-7235-2
Thomas Tuohy
The Lake District in the remote Cumbrian peninsular of northwest England was celebrated by poets in the 18th century as the British Arcadia, and in 1778 Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes he encouraged readers to contemplate ‘Alpine Scenery’. He recommended viewing points or ‘Stations’ from which the picturesque tourist could admire a landscape composed in the manner of a painting by Claude. William Green (1760–1823), a surveyor from Manchester, was encouraged by West to take up painting. Forty-Eight Views of the Lake District, and Four Views of Wales, a collection of prints published in 1795, was followed by other volumes of aquatints of Lake District views, and in 1819 The Tourist’s New Guide to the Lakes. Settling in the district in 1800, he befriended Wordsworth, who in his epitaph wrote: ‘By his skill and industry as an artist he produced faithfully representations of this country.’ For Norman Nicholson, writing the introduction to William Green of Ambleside (by Mary Burkett and David Sloss, 1984), Green, with his greater topographical accuracy, marks a turning point in the way people looked at the Lakes. He was also a pioneer in painting and printmaking, and in promoting the Lake District for personal profit. The production and reproduction of views of the Lake District was to provide employment for many painters in future generations.
Railways came to the Lakes in the mid-19th century, to Windermere in 1847, Coniston in 1859, and Keswick in 1861. In 1871 John Ruskin bought Brantwood, a small house slightly elevated above West’s ‘Station III’ on Coniston Water, with a view to the Old Man of Coniston, ‘il Vecchio’, as he called it. Ruskin lived there until his death in 1900. His objections helped to prevent railways from debouching hordes of tourists in Grasmere, but the attraction of the Lakes was irresistible, not just for holiday visitors, but for an increasing number of affluent families from Manchester or Bolton who built second homes in the area. Just as Londoners would have second homes, country houses in the Home Counties where families could escape the smog and pollution, many families from industrial towns in Lancashire chose the Lake District, some of which was part of Lancashire before 1974.
The late Matthew Hyde (1947–2015) has added considerably to our knowledge of these houses in his revised edition of Pevsner’s Cumbria (2010) and, with Esme Whittaker, Arts and Craft Houses in the Lake District (2014). Some of these houses also feature in Tim Longville’s Gardens of the Lake District (2007), and both of these books are enhanced by photographs by Val Corbett.
The most accessible example of such houses today is Blackwell (1898–1900) built for Sir Edward Holt, a brewer who became Mayor of Manchester. Designed by MH Baillie Scott it is an outstanding example of the Ruskin-inspired Arts and Crafts Movement. The Keswick School of Industrial Design (founded by Edith Fletcher Rawnsley in 1884), Langdale Linen, and the wood-carving and cabinet-making of Arthur Simpson (1847–1922), who exhibited his work in Kendal from 1887, flourished upon the patronage of new money being spent on fitting and furnishing the new houses. At the same time, there was a growing demand for images of the Lake District and Simpson also afforded space for landscape painters to show their work. George Abraham’s photographic shop opened in Keswick in 1877, and Mason’s Art Gallery and Bazaar in Ambleside sold photographs and paintings.
In 1904 the Lake Artists Society was established so that painters could profit by showing their work at an annual exhibition when seasonal residents and tourists were most abundant. Several of the members also exhibited at the Royal Academy, and in Manchester. The first exhibition was in Coniston in 1905, but Grasmere and Keswick also provided venues chosen in successive years. The founder of the Society was William Gershom Collingwood (1854–1932), Ruskin’s assistant for many years, also founder of the Ruskin Museum in Coniston in 1901, added on to the Institute and Library, built in 1897. An antiquarian with an interest in Norse crosses in Cumberland, his designs for Ruskin’s Memorial, and later a number of War Memorials, reflect this. He was also a painter, as was Arthur Severn, who was married to Ruskin’s niece Joan – who cared for Ruskin at Brantwood. Collingwood was from Liverpool, Severn was born in Rome, and very few members of this new Society were native to the area. Edward Tucker, who produced five sons who painted in Windermere, was born in London.
Jane Renouf, author of the Lake Artists Society, A Centenary Celebration (2004), provides biographies of members up to that date, and the society still exists with an elected membership, and annual exhibitions are still held in Grasmere Village Hall. In 1997 Renouf published Alfred Heaton Cooper, Painter of Landscape. Alfred (1864–1929) was born in Bolton, to parents working in a cotton mill, and he worked as a clerk in the Town Hall from the age of fourteen. An artistic talent was encouraged by his mother, and he copied prints by Turner, something Ruskin recommended to students learning to draw landscapes in The Elements of Drawing, published in 1857. In 1884 Alfred won a scholarship to The Westminster School of Art, then in Tufton Street, near Deans Yard. George Clausen was one of his teachers. He travelled to Norway, staying at Balholm on the Sognafjord, where international tourists arrived by steamer, and he sold his works there and through art dealers in Newcastle and Bolton. In 1894 he married Mathilde Valentinsen, daughter of a wool dyer in Balholm. They lived in Bolton, then Southport, a seaside enclave of nouveaux riches from industrial towns, but in 1900 they moved to Coniston, where the aura of Ruskin continued to attract discriminating visitors.
In 1904 Alfred had the good fortune to be approached by the publishers A & C Black to provide 75 illustrations, at £3 each, for The English Lakes, a book written by WT Palmer. Book illustration was to become a consistent source of income, but he had no copyright agreement and so payments were not continuous, and he had to work hard. He was able to have his log cabin studio in Norway transported to Coniston, and as this was painted bright red it was difficult to ignore. There was a slight disagreement with Collingwood over the establishment of the new society, which Alfred was not invited to join. Collingwood wrote an emollient letter to Cooper in 1905 indicating that he would be welcome to join the society. The offer was not taken up, but Alfred did exhibit when invited in 1913, and he and Collingwood shared Norse interests.
Alfred’s son William (1903–1995), was born in Coniston, studied with his father, by then living in Ambleside, and at Kendal Art School, before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied painting with Clausen and Sickert, and drawing with Francis Ernest Jackson (1872–1945), a distinguished teacher whose memorial in St James’s Picadilly includes a Pietà painted by him in a style reminiscent of Giovanni Bellini. Jackson told William, ‘Truth is rather like a diamond with an infinite number of facets. No one can see all of them. You may see a few of them this evening, I may see a few more. Be content with putting down on paper, as simply as possible, what truth you do see.’ In his landscapes William was not a slave to topographical exactitude. He moved to Paris, then to Provence, influenced by Cèzanne, and his style was much more graphic and linear than his father’s. His watercolours are sometimes reminiscent of the tinted drawings of Francis Towne, who visited the Lake District in 1786.
Like his father, Heaton, as he was known (and signed his work), illustrated books, but also wrote them. The success of The Hills of Lakeland helped to finance the building of a house and the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere in 1938. This still flourishes under the management of his family and continues to sell prints of Heaton Cooper paintings, as well as having a gallery for special exhibitions. In 1938 he also joined the Lake Artists Society, which he went on to serve as president for 11 years, and he was elected RI (Royal Institute of Artists in Watercolours) in 1953. He joined and climbed with the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District, and provided drawings to illustrate the club’s guide books. Although intended as technical guides, many of the drawings of rock faces, such as Dow Crag in The Hills of Lakeland, are pleasing as work of art. In 2012 at Rheged, near Penrith, there was an exhibition curated by Julian Cooper with a catalogue – Heaton Cooper: A Family of Artists 1863–2012 – which provides much more detailed biographical information about the family. Ophelia Gordon Bell (1915–1975), a sculptor, born in Bayswater, was Julian’s mother, and Linda Ryle, from Newcastle, who became Julian’s wife in 1972 is a fine painter who, in recent years, has specialized in still-lifes.
1 Kailash, North Face, Afternoon by Julian Cooper, 2007. Oil on canvas, 180 x 251 cm.
Private Collection
Julian Cooper
Julian Heaton Cooper, the youngest son of William and his wife Ophelia, was born in Grasmere in 1947. Influenced by his parents and the local fells which he explored, together with art books and back copies of The Studio magazine to which his grandfather and father subscribed, Julian took up painting at an early age. His mother modelled portrait heads of John Hunt and Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mount Everest in 1953, and Julian would have been aware of international mountaineering as a boy. With considerable mountaineering experience, he has gradually evolved into the outstanding master of epic paintings of mountains and rock but, resisting the family tradition, it took him some time before he fully established his distinctive mature style. The Art of Julian Cooper is a very personal reflection by the painter, outlining his development as an artist who has painted some of the great mountains of the world, explaining the technical details and methods by which he paints canvasses, frequently on a large scale. This book lists Julian’s exhibitions, many, since 1998, with Michael Richardson at the Art Space Gallery in Islington. Andrew Lambirth, who has known Julian for over 20 years, and contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, has written the Introduction, in which he describes the artist as a modern Romantic, more visceral than conceptual, who combines abstraction and realism. In the preface, Melvyn Bragg, who has followed Julian’s progress since he bought Greenhead Ghyll, a precocious large Cumbrian landscape painted in 1982, suggests that Julian ranks among painters such as Freud, Bacon and Hockney.
Julian learnt something of the practice of art from his parents, before going to Goldsmith’s College School of Art at New Cross from 1965 to 1969. His early abstract work in oils was, even then, assuredly painterly and richly coloured. Most of the teaching was post-painterly abstract and conceptual, but he had helpful instruction in drawing from Sam Rabin (1903–1991). The latter, originally Samuel Rabinovitch, had won a bronze medal for wrestling at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and because of his physique was cast in two Alexander Korda films – The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 and The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1934. But Rabin was a serious artist who studied at the Slade and in Paris, and was commissioned, together with Epstein, Gill and Moore, to produce carved reliefs on Charles Holden’s London Underground headquarters. At Goldsmith’s from 1949, Rabin was described ‘an outstanding teacher of drawing, renowned among his students and colleagues for his commanding presence and disciplined classes and for demonstrating the principles of drawing.’ He left Goldsmith’s dissatisfied because teaching was moving away from the figurative tradition, and Julian’s tuition with him would have been brief.
When asked to make a drawing based on any painting in the National Gallery, Julian chose Rembrandt’s characterful, craggy portrait of the aged matriarch Margaretha de Geer, but drawing seems not to have formed a significant element in Julian’s later working methods. He is conscious of the continuum of the history of art in Europe: ‘Every mark you make should have the whole of the history of art behind it, and you have to be breaking a little bit of ground each time.’ His figurative painting was strongly influenced by the Early Italian painters, Giotto, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, whose figures have a volumetric static quality, and his early reading included books by Ernst Gombrich and Edgar Wind. He won a scholarship that enabled him to live in Italy (1969–70), having a studio at the British School at Rome for part of that time. In the manner of Piero his figures in action convey no feeling of movement: Reading the White Goddess (1987, Abbott Hall, Kendal), which depicts Julian himself climbing a hill, is a good example. In the Forest (1991) shows a figure derived from Narcissus in Palazzo Barberini, Rome, by Caravaggio, another painter admired by Julian.
Chiaroscuro distinguishes Julian’s doom-laden, populated urban interiors inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano – which prompted a visit to Mexico. These works also feature small distinctive landscape views, giving a hint of what was to come. Julian’s later landscapes suggest familiarity with Turner’s The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre of Teufels Broch (Abbott Hall, Kendal), James Ward’s large Gordale Scar (Tate Britain), and the work of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918). But, showing little interest in skies, water, weather or trees, his work is far removed from the landscapes of Turner and Constable. His greatest achievement is through his communion with mountains, which take on a personal quality, more akin to a close-up portrait than a conventional landscape. From 1971 he had experience as a theatrical scene painter, something his father had done in the 1930s in London theatres and for films by Michael Powell and Alexander Korda.
The use of long-handled brushes, with the need to stand back from the canvas, was used to great effect in Julian’s later paintings of mountains. In 1975 Julian and Linda moved to Rydal, close to Grasmere, although he retained a studio in London until 1990. He likes cities, and Paris and Cairo feature in early works. By 1979 Julian felt that Modernism was running out of steam and increasingly he found the idea of putting his own experience of mountains into his paintings was getting stronger. Kirkstone Boulder (137 x 214 cm), painted in 1979 with long brushes, seems to have been his earliest large-scale rock painting. He started using a portable aluminium frame to which he attached a large canvas, and went on regular painting and climbing trips in the Lake District and the Highlands, painting outdoors, with Terry Gifford, an eco-criticism specialist and poet: ‘Painting in these ways enabled me to engage directly with the natural world using my whole body, giving the paint physical presence on the canvas beyond the descriptive. I was moving a step closer to the long-avoided mountain subjects my father and grandfather had painted, but on my own terms.’ Large-scale outdoor painting had challenges. The rain in Scotland made the paint dribble down the canvas and so he went to the Peruvian Andes for a drier climate, but there the wind caused problems. His father had also been in the Andes and painted Mount Aconcagua.
In 1999 Julian went on a Himalayan expedition with the mountaineer Alan Howard, painting Kanchenjunga, working on small canvases on site. He learned to look intently at mountains, looking through binoculars and using telephoto images to fix images in his mind and to record his impressions, which were later worked up on large scale in the studio. These have a personal quality as if they were of portraits of familiar mountains, rather than conventional landscapes. Even the smaller paintings have a monumental quality, which of course depends upon proportion and mass rather than size.
In 2002 Julian and Linda moved from Ambleside to Cockermouth, outside the National Park, finding ‘it was refreshing to escape the oppressively commodified centre of the Lake District’. He began to take an interest in the human impact on landscape, in the old mines and quarries such as Honister, and in 2008 this led him to Carrara, where his mother had been long before. He painted in the Alps, notably the rock faces of the Eiger in 2004, and in 2007 he went on another Himalayan expedition, invited by the mountaineer Julian Freeman Attwood (whose mother was the art historian Liz Mostyn Owen). There, he took the pilgrim’s circular route kora around Mount Kailash (see Pl 1), sacred to Buddhists and Hindus: ‘I wanted the real mountain brought into the room on canvas, constructed from individual paint marks, each mark a mental grasping of form, with thin washes of pigment suggesting thin air – perhaps taking on some of the characteristics of a religious icon.’ The downward drizzle of liquid paint accentuates the verticality of the image, with perhaps a veil of abstract expressionism.
Julian experiences a psychological affinity with mountains, referencing ‘Mind has mountains’ from a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he used as the title of an exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere in 2001, but he also enjoys the stimulation of a physical engagement with mountains. He shares a close interest in geology with Ruskin, who wrote ‘mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth what muscular action is to the body of man’. Although his visceral, vivid works, painted with a broad brush and on a large scale, seem very different from Ruskin’s, his intense scrutiny and sensitive observation of rocks and mountains resonates with his predecessor’s intimate drawings and watercolours, never intended for exhibition. Ruskin, in Coniston in 1873, wrote of the Lake District, ‘The scenery is – I think – the best in England… there are more subjects in any twenty furlongs than in twenty miles of other country… As for moor or mountain – I have rocks within two miles of me as fine as the St Gothard.’
Having relished the physical challenges of altitude and cold in the Himalayas when he was younger, Julian can still find subjects locally that require less endurance and stamina, and they featured in his most recent exhibition in 2023, ‘Lines of Descent’. Subjects chosen in the fells around Buttermere and Crummock Water, are treated in a new way, more horizontal than vertical, looking down or across valleys, and emphasising the softness and colour of seasonal vegetation.
This book lists public collections that hold his works, although they remain elusive. In Italy he is represented in the collection of the distinguished climber Reinhold Messner at Firmian, near Bolzano, Alto Adige, and in the Museo della Montagna in Turin, and it is not surprising that some of his best paintings have been bought by mountaineers. Provincial museums in England cannot be relied upon to display items from permanent collections, and it is not easy to experience the power of Julian’s work. His largest painting, Scafell Crag (396 x 305 cm) was commissioned in 2000 by the Mountain Heritage Trust, based in Threlkend, for a National Mountaineering Exhibition. The brief called for figures, which Julian had used in earlier works, but by now he felt his rock paintings would be more powerful without figures, which seemed to be repeating the kind of images seen in mountaineering books and magazines. This painting hung high in the atrium at Rheged, which is a superior service station with an auditorium and a gallery for art exhibitions, off the A66 near Penrith. In this much-frequented place this was the most accessible of all of his works, and it was here that the writer of this review first encountered the work of Julian Cooper in 2012. The admiration, and recognition of quality, was immediate, rather as Melvyn Bragg describes his first encounter in his Foreword to this book. Regrettably, wishing to raise funds for cataloguing their archive, the Trust sold the painting at Mitchells Auctioneers, Cockermouth, in 2024. Cressida Inglewood, who has a good collection of Julian’s work, including the large Kailash, North Face, Morning, which can be seen by the visiting public in the dining room at Hutton-in-the-Forest, bought the painting but found it was too large for the intended position on the staircase. Powerful works like this require a space that allows a distant view. Ideally it might find a place on loan in a space in the University of Cumbria in Carlisle, or even back at Rheged. This beautifully illustrated book provides a welcome opportunity to assess the full range of Julian Cooper’s work, which deserves to been seen more widely.
Julian far surpasses his forebears, both in international scope and in working in oils, and on a large scale. His work is completely different from the essentially provincial watercolour tradition on the Lake Artists Society.
Edward Horace Thompson
Beyond their having both been born in Cumberland Julian Cooper also has very little in common with Edward Horace Thompson (1879–1949), the subject of a new book by Charles Nugent. Thompson was the most prolific purveyor of Lake District views, following in the tradition started by William Green, but offering ‘original’ watercolours rather than prints. He was born in Workington in West Cumberland, a coastal area that prospered on mining and heavy industry throughout the 19th century, attracting working people from Ireland, Cornwall, Scotland and Northumberland, very different from the affluent ‘off-comers’ who settled around Windermere. The area suffered severely from the industrial depression of 1929. His father was employed at the Moss Bay Steel Works, and Edward worked as a clerk there from 1893 to 1918, painting in his spare time before working full time as painter. He had no art training, but seems to have had lessons with Joseph Barnes (L.A.S. 1905) who was living in Keswick in 1891. Thompson did not paint from nature, but made copies from illustrations in travel books published by A & C Black, including Alfred Heaton Cooper’s The English Lakes. He sold his work initially to friends, then in pubs and hotels, but from 1920 collaborated with Abraham Brothers’ photographic shop in Keswick. He painted coloured versions of the popular black-and-white photographs. He produced about 10,000 watercolours, so we are told, frequently repeating subjects, and these, with their gilded mounts and frames, were very popular, not only with tourist visitors, and they were ubiquitous in the parlours of the middling classes in West Cumberland. In their original frames, they have a distinct and reassuring period feel.
The book by Charles Nugent (1962–2023) about Thompson was published posthumously in 2025, and he concedes that Thompson was not a painter of the first rank. Indeed, he was really a copyist, who might well have felt surprised and flattered to receive such professional posthumous critical appraisal. Charles started collecting his work in 1991, when he was working at Christie’s in London. In 1992 he bought a book he found in the Helena Thompson Museum in Workington, written by Colin W Richardson, A Phenomenal Talent: The Life and Paintings of Edward H. Thompson, and this provided Charles with the biographical information for his own fully illustrated book.
Charles Nugent himself had a distinguished career. After six years at Christie’s he became a curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, where he wrote a catalogue of the watercolours (published in 2003). He also wrote a catalogue of the landscapes by Edward Lear set in Ireland and the Lake District, in connection with an exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, in 2009. His book George Cockram, 1861–1950, From Birkenhead to Anglesey: an artist rediscovered was published in 2020. Charles was a fell runner and had a detailed and informed knowledge of the topography of the Lake District. Before his terminal cancer diagnosis he was doing research on Delmar Banner* (1896–1983), but he was able to complete his Thompson book shortly before he died.
Charles was an avid collector, and apart from four works in the Keswick museum, all of the paintings in this book are from his own collection. Michael Fulda, a dealer in Salford, and Mitchells Auctioneers in Cockermouth were his principal sources. The book is organized chronologically, where works are dated (between 1901 and 1931), and most of them are of views around the Western valleys: Borrowdale, Eskdale, Ennerdale and Wasdale. His early oil paintings from 1901–to 1911,were priced at three guineas.
The book provides fully illustrated information about frames and labels and, where views are taken from Abraham black-and-white photographs, these are also illustrated. Paintings intended to be reproduced as postcards (published by Valentines of Dundee) provided another source of income, and they include views of Dovedale, Scotland and Wales, as well as 62 Lake District scenes, some of which derived from Alfred Heaton Cooper book illustrations. The postcard section in the book was compiled with the collaboration of Glen James, another enthusiastic collector, who lives in Scotland. Further appendices provide detail of prices, labels and signatures and show works by pupils of Thompson, Albert Rosser (1899–1985) and Othello Dunwood (1900–1983).
Most of Thompson’s views are taken from lake level, slightly raised as they would have been seen from a seat in a charabanc, lending a sense of familiarity to tourists wanting a souvenir. Variations occur with changes in light and weather, but the purpose was to record familiar topography and his work enjoyed local popularity. Originality was rare. Lakeland Composite is a skilful combination of two plates from The English Lakes: The Shepherd, Yewdale, Coniston, and A Fell Fox-hunt, the Head of Eskdale with Scawfell. This book will be of interest to the many people who have grown up with these colourful views on their walls, and it will be a useful tool for collectors, but it seems fair to suggest, it will be more suited to readers of Antiques Trade Gazette than The British Art Journal.
*Charlie Nugent gave Thomas Tuohy a copy of his research notes relating to Delmar Banner’s figurative work, notably portraits, and he is undertaking archival research to prepare a biography for the website cumbrianlives.org.uk. But he will not be taking on the daunting task of preparing a catalogue.