Circle of Thomas Sidney Cooper RA Donkey, Cow & Sheep in a Mountain Landscape

An original mid-19th-century watercolour painting, Circle of Thomas Sidney Cooper RA, Donkey, Cow & Sheep in a Mountain Landscape.

A charming animal painting, sensitively rendered in watercolour with brown ink and bodycolour highlights. A donkey, resting cow and sheep are assembled prominently in the foreground, behind which a mountainous landscape rises in pale blue-grey wash.

The treatment of the animals is very much in the vein of Thomas Sidney Cooper (1803–1902), one of the foremost animal painters of Victorian Britain. Cooper hailed from Canterbury, and after a penurious childhood and short time at the Royal Academy Schools, in 1824 he travelled to Brussels in search of work. This was to have a profound influence on the direction of his art, as he became good friends with the great Belgian animal painter Eugene Verboeckhoven (1798–1881). In his turn, Verboeckhoven was influenced by the Dutch and Flemish animaliers of the 17th-century, such as Paulus Potter and Albert Cuyp, whose rural scenes featured domesticated animals in a bucolic landscape.

Returning to Canterbury in 1831, Thomas Sidney Cooper became known as ‘The Cuyp of Kent’. Employing what he had learnt from Verboeckhoven, he found a ready market for animal paintings amongst wealthy farmers and landowners, modelling ordered life in the farmyard as a paradigm of a well-governed state. Cooper's paintings focused on livestock and cows in particular, so much so that he earned the epithet 'Cow' Cooper. He left horses and dogs to other painters, believing them not picturesque.

The landscape backdrop in the present painting has the appearance of being Swiss, which links it to Verboeckhoven's continental subjects: he visited Italy and Switzerland in the 1840s and filled his travel notebooks with the landscapes that he encountered.

Overall, a charming subject representing an important period in the history of animal painting.

On cream wove paper with very faint watermark impression W[hatman?].