Edward Cooper

Edward Cooper (–1725) was an English print seller, regarded as the most distinguished print publisher of his generation and a leading figure in the art world. Life and career Nothing is known of Cooper's early life; the earliest secure mention of him as publisher is an advertisement for an anonymous portrait of Thomas Thynne, published in the True Protestant Mercury on 21 February 1682. He first began to challenge the painter and publisher Alexander Browne's command on the mezzotint publishing business in 1684, and in 1686 he obtained a royal privilege protecting his plates against copies for a term of fourteen years. 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. Mezzotint was the characteristic staple of Cooper's business, but he also issued some engravings and etching. Along with Richard Tompson, Cooper co-published c. 1682–1686 Peter Vanderbank's etchings after the ceilings in the north range at Windsor Castle; in 1691, he published Dirk Maas's large etching of The Battle of the Boyne. 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. As a retailer, Cooper dealt in old master prints, imported Italian prints, and was named in advertisements as a principal distributor of such important English undertakings as Nicolas Dorigny's prints of the Raphael Cartoons and James Thornhill's prints of his designs for the cupola of St Paul's Cathedral. Beside from prints, Cooper also sold paintings and artists' materials, and was widely acknowledged among England's leading connoisseurs. In 1703, he valued Robert Hooke's print collection and by 1711 he was distributing catalogues of important auction sales of paintings; it is likely that he was the cataloguer and possibly the auctioneer of many of these sales, such as one held in January 1719, reported in The Daily Courant that month.