Frederick Charles Cooper

Mathaf Gallery, London
Purchased from the above

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 33, catalogued & illustrated

Probably, London, Royal Academy, 1852, no. 1297 (as Scene from the excavations at Nineveh, taken from a sketch made on the spot, while engaged with A.H. Layard, Esq)
Probably, London, British Institution, 1855, no. 388 (as Scene in the Excavations at Nineveh; from a sketch taken by the artist while with Austen H. Layard, Esq., M.P., etc.)

Little is known about Frederick Charles Cooper prior to the 1840s. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844 with a work titled Ophelia. He became recognized after he joined Austen Henry Layard (archeologist, politician and diplomat) on a significant expedition in 1849 as the official artist. Layard writes in his 1853 text Discoveries among the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon  ‘the assistance of a competent artist was most desirable, to portray with fidelity those monuments which injury and decay had rendered unfit for removal. Mr. F. Cooper was selected by the Trustees of the British Museum to accompany the expedition in this capacity’. 

The expedition resulted in the excavation of Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia. Layard had first seen the mounds of Nineveh when he and his travelling companion Edward Mitford passed through Mosul in early 1840. He explored the ruins in 1847 however two years later, on the eastern shores of the river Tigris opposite Mosul, the lost palace of Sennacherib was discovered. Cooper produced important watercolour works and drawings of the excavation and local topography in Northern Iraq and north-east Syria. Many of the original drawings are in the collection of the British Museum, including a work depicting two lions at the entrance to the shrine of Ninurta, Nimrud; a drawing showing an enormous human-headed Assyrian winged gateway figure being lowered by ropes onto a wooden trolley; and a watercolour version of the present lot inscribed Arabs engaged in excavation. The present oil portrays the same tunnel through Sennacherib’s palace however Cooper has placed the figures differently and included a bas-relief on the left. The relief is likely an invention although based on carvings he knew from his drawings on site.

Austen Henry Layard published detailed reports of the excavations and in depth recollections from his travels in his book Nineveh and its Remains in 1849. The book was a best-seller in Victorian England, aided by the close links Layard made between Nineveh and the Bible. He then published Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon four years later. In 1851, Cooper compiled a group of thirty seven paintings from the expedition which were exhibited as a diorama of Nineveh at the Gothic Hall, Lower Grosvenor Street in London.