John Paul Cooper, an arts and crafts man

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Alfred Mayor

John Paul Cooper (1869-1933), a successful arts and crafts designer and craftsman in a number of mediums, was the son of a prosperous self-made principal in a machine knitting company in Leicester, England. Wanting to be a writer, John Paul settled for architecture, which his father, disappointed that he did not join the machine knitting business, felt was a more reputable profession. Thus began Cooper's serendipitous ascent into the more rarified air of the arts and crafts.

When John D. Sedding, in whose architectural firm Cooper worked, died, his colleague and Cooper's great friend Henry Wilson took over. Wilson's subsequent interest in ornamental plasterwork led Cooper to experiment with gesso-covered boxes carved in low relief. In fact, they were a cooperative effort, with an outside craftsman supplying the box, Cooper the design, and May Morgan Oliver, his second cousin and future wife, the actual gesso work The designs themselves were often elaborately symbolic, for Cooper subscribed to the current belief in the interrelationship of everything. He believed the artist should discover "the inner properties in things--the ideas underlying them" and pass them on to the viewer. One casket is decorated with visions Cooper had late in 1907 after practicing mental exercises developed by Martha Craig, a psychic.

The patient and talented May Cooper was also her husband's craftsman- collaborator in his next medium--mother-of-pearl. Once again, the wooden boxes to be decorated were made by an outside craftsman, often of ebony In keeping with the arts and crafts philosophy design grew out of the materials. For Cooper mother-of-pearl possessed "the dreaming shining peaceful atmosphere one associates & connects with the depths of the sea," and this in tuna Cooper associated with femininity, making mother-of-pearl an ideal material for ladies' toilet sets.

If remembered at all today Cooper is associated with shagreen, the skin of various sharks and rays that is covered not with scales but with tough, closely set nodules. In Japan it was used in its natural state to wrap sowrd handles, since it was durable and offered a secure gripping surface. In Europe in the eighteenth century it was smoothed, dyed, and used to cover instrument and eyeglass cases and telescopes. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century even the method of treating the skins had been forgotten, and shagreen's chief use was by cabinetmakers as sandpaper. When Cooper became intrigued by the artistic possibilities of shagreen he insisted, as a good arts and crafts man, that the nodules be filed smooth by hand. However, finding this both difficult and tedious, he compromised and bought his skins already filed from China His daughter Ursula remembers the vile smelling brews he mixed to achieve the dyes he wanted. Cooper's stock books record nearly one thousand shagreen covered objects he pr oduced before the art was once again lost when he ceased using shagreen during the last years of his life. Cooper felt shagreen possessed "some of the qualities of both M of P [mother-of-pearl] & leather. Its little nodules of concentric rings give one, when the skin is particularly translucent, the feeling of looking deep down into a pool of seagreen water, there is a little mist at the bottom, so one never quite catches sight of what is there, if it would only clear a little one might get a glimpse of sea anemones, & seaweed waving in the wash of the tide or shells or fish or strange crawling beasts. One can't do much with a thing like that--put a silver bank round it, I mean a moulding, that is practically all." When applied to the shagreen toilet service he made for Lady Armatrude Waechter de Grimston in the late 1920s, he carried the associations of the fish skin into the silver mounts, on which he represented, fish, lobsters, crabs, shells, seaweed, and even mermaids.

Cooper also worked with silver, gold, and precious stones, which he took to be "symbols or types of the Divinity and as gifts to man from the Gods themselves." The divine and magical attributes of these materials dictated his designs, in what is by now a familiar pattern. Thus jewelry was not ornament but symbolism "The bee was a symbol of the soul....The hawk was a symbol of Horns.... And among plants the rose with its thorns symbolized love & the lily and lotus the productive power of nature," and so forth.

Cooper's son Francis recalled that in his attempt to "recapture something of early times, which he felt had been lost" he used only the most rudimentary silver-smithing techniques and most basic decorative motifs. "My father," he wrote, "was suspicious of all machine work, as making for deadness. Polishing in our workshop had to be done on an old treadle lathe, the only machine we had. Exhaustion took over long before it was possible to polish away too much metal surface and so risk removing marks left by the hand."

The author of this informative monograph has relied to great effect on Cooper's many surviving stock books, costing books, and journals, which offer a wonderfully three-dimensional picture of his life and art. Paralleling the almost mystical exploration of his materials and his interest in the transcendental was a life of rigid discipline. As Francis Cooper recalled: "My father liked to plan his day Meals had to be punctual, so there was no waiting for each other We got up at 7 when my father occupied the bathroom for a longish time.... He need not have taken nearly so long over shaving but in order to 'save time' and to do two jobs at once, he used to also learn a language. A dictionary being part of his shaving kit.... After breakfast he would go into the studio for half an hour of quiet reading and meditation." Thereafter he would discuss the day's work with his assistants. At about eleven o'clock he went outside for exercise. At 12:30 there was a vegetarian lunch (since Cooper had a chronic tricky tummy) followed by a pipe. "We had tea to drink only at 4, high tea at 5 because it was thought by my parents not to be good to eat and drink at the same time." The evening was devoted to reading and writing. Francis concludes: "There were never any idle moments for him."