William Heaton Cooper RA, (1903 - 1995)
William Heaton Cooper RA (6 October 1903 – 1995) was a notable English impressionistic landscape artist who worked predominantly in watercolours, most famous for his paintings of the Lake District. Since the 1950s, he has become known as one of the most celebrated British landscape artists of the 20th century.
Heaton Cooper was born in Coniston, Cumbria, in the English Lake District in 1903, the third child to a Nor-wegian mother, Mathilde, and the landscape artist Alfred Heaton Cooper.
William Heaton Cooper was strongly influenced by his father's artistic style. Alfred lived entirely by his painting and William soon aspired to follow in his father's footsteps. He gained a scholarship to the Royal Academy School in London and subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy, with the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Institute. Alongside his painting, he became an authority on the lore and landscape of the Lake District, walking and rock climbing in its mountains with the pioneer climbers of the 1920s.
William's style of mountain painting is more impressio-nistic than his father's, with his knowledge of geology used to the full in his sometimes spare and skeletal depiction of crags and fells. He was fascinated by the ever changing light of Lakeland, with views seldom looking twice alike. His most spectacular pictures were obtained in the light of evening or dawn, to which end he would walk miles over the fells, camping out to capture the late or early glows over fell tops and lakes.