Thomas Sidney Cooper (1803-1902) was the leading British animal painter of the Victorian age, so closely identified with his favoured subject matter that he became known in his own lifetime simply as "Cow Cooper." Born in Canterbury to a poor family, his father having abandoned them when Thomas was still a child, he began work at twelve as a coach painter and later as a scene painter for a travelling theatre, all the while drawing and painting in every spare moment. An uncle eventually funded a place for him at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1824, where he was encouraged by Sir Thomas Lawrence, though he left before completing the course and returned to Canterbury to earn a living as a drawing master.
A period in Brussels from around 1827, where Cooper both taught and studied, proved decisive: there he met the Belgian animal painter Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven, whose influence shaped Cooper's mature style, before the 1830 Belgian Revolution forced his return to London. Settling near Smithfield Market, where he sketched cattle directly from life, Cooper began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1833 and went on to show there for an unbroken run of some seventy years, a career of quite exceptional length that carried him from the reign of George IV to the year after Queen Victoria's death. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1845 and a full Royal Academician in 1867, was received by Edward VII in 1901 as the Academy's oldest member, and was appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order the same year. Cooper used his considerable prosperity generously in his native Canterbury, funding a theatre, purchasing property to establish the Sidney Cooper Gallery of Art, and, in 1882, founding an art school that survives today as part of Canterbury Christ Church University.
The painting by Cooper held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a study of a lurcher, reflects the wider practice in animal painting that underpinned his fame, extending beyond the cattle and sheep for which he remains best known. Cooper's paintings are held in major public collections including the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and his remarkably long and productive career places him among the most historically significant British animal painters of the nineteenth century.