Rudulph, Marilou Alston.

Born in eastern Maryland in 1793, Cooke taught himself to paint in the flat, linear manner often found in American art in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By the early 1820s he was executing portraits in Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia. His first formal training was with Charles Bird King (1785-1862)... In 1826 Cooke and his wife, Maria Heath, left America and spent six years in Italy, England, and France. There he copied classical sculpture, prints after Greek and Roman art, Italian Renaissance and baroque paintings, and modern Neoclassical and Romantic paintings... Cooke's largest and best-known painting is Interior of St. Peter's Rome (1847, Chapel, University of Georgia, Athens). This work is an enlargement of an earlier painting he executed in Florence, Italy, using images by the late-seventeenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini and the contemporary British painter John Martin... Cooke was consistent in his approach to art. Once he understood the aesthetic views of the old masters, he applied them to all his subjects... He attained great success with... portraits and by the late 1840s was one of the South's best-known painters.-- "George Cooke (1793-1849)" New Georgia Encyclopedia. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/ (Retrieved December 4, 2008)