Colin Campbell Cooper (1856 - 1937). Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. was an American Impressionist painter, perhaps most renowned for his architectural paintings, especially of skyscrapers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. An avid traveler, he was also known for his paintings of European and Asian landmarks, as well as natural landscapes, portraits, florals, and interiors. In addition to being a painter, he was also a teacher and writer. His first wife, Emma Lampert Cooper, was also a highly regarded painter. Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1856, into a well-to-do family of English-Irish heritage. He had four older and four younger siblings. His mother, Emily Williams Cooper, whose ancestor emigrated to the U.S. from Weymouth, England, was an amateur painter in watercolors. His father, Dr. Colin Campbell Cooper, whose grandfather came from Derry, Ireland, was a surgeon and a lawyer with a great appreciation for the arts. Young Colin had been inspired by the art which he discovered when he attended the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Both of his parents were highly supportive of his ambitions, encouraging him to become an artist. In 1879, Cooper enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying art under famed controversial realist painter Thomas Eakins for three years. In 1886, he embarked on the first of his many travels to foreign lands, visiting the Netherlands, Belgium, and Brittany. Afterwards, his art education resumed at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1886 to 1890, with Henri Lucien Doucet, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. His work of this period consisted mostly of landscapes painted in a Barbizon manner. He traveled extensively throughout his life, sketching and painting scenes of Europe, Asia, and the United States in watercolors and oils. Back in Philadelphia, Cooper taught watercolor classes and architectural rendering at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry from 1895 to 1898. Many of Cooper's paintings were destroyed in an 1896 fire at Philadelphia's Hazeltine Galleries; as a result, relatively little of his early work exists today. While at Drexel, he spent his summers abroad, primarily in the Dutch artists colony of Laren in North Holland and in Dordrecht in South Holland. Among the other artists in Dordrecht at this time was renowned painter Emma Lampert from Rochester, New York. She and Cooper met, and were soon married, in Rochester on June 9, 1897. In 1898, the Coopers returned to Europe for a few years. During this period, as Cooper painted architectural landmarks, he developed the Impressionist style which he used for the rest of his artistic career. Cooper and his wife exhibited together in several two-person shows, including a May 1902 exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Club and a 1915 show at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. They moved in 1904 to New York City, where he would remain, other than his many travels, until 1921. Here he continued work, which he had begun about two years earlier in Philadelphia, on his famous skyscraper paintings. Cooper said that he was greatly interested in the skyscraper buildings in Broad Street. It was intensely interesting to watch the freakishness disappear from those queer towering structures in the glory of the right kind of light. He said that the painting which first brought him great success was 1902's Broad Street, New York; in 1903, this painting was honored with the W. T. Evans Award of the New York Watercolor Club. In another interview, he had stated that one of the points that most strikes me about this view up Broad Street is the dramatic contrast between the old, low type of buildings. and the great skyscrapers. My pictures are built on these contrasts. In 1911, The New York Times, citing Cooper as the artist who best captured modern, towering structures on canvas, declared him to be the skyscraper artist par excellence of America. In an article the following year, they stated that he was one of the most interesting figures in American art, reiterating that in his particular field he has no superior. In addition to New York City, his paintings often depict skyscrapers in Philadelphia and Chicago. Cooper's painting Fifth Avenue, New York was purchased by the French government for the Musee du Luxembourg. Such an honor was quite rare for an American artist. Critics at the time, and up to the present, frequently compared the works of Cooper and Childe Hassam. They have often been credited as being the two most iconic artists whose paintings began a trend of celebrating the wonders of the modern city, especially New York City.