Thomas Cooper Gotch
1854–1931 · English painter and book illustrator loosely linked to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Newlyn art colony
Thomas Cooper Gotch (Kettering, 1854 – London, 1931) was an English painter and book illustrator loosely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His significance lies in his role within the Newlyn art colony in Cornwall, where he spent much of his career. He was the brother of the architect and author John Alfred Gotch.
Gotch studied in London, first at Heatherley's and then at the Slade School, and in 1877 and 1878 he trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. There he met Caroline Yates, whom he married in 1881. The couple completed their training in Paris, at the Académie Julian and the Académie Laurens, where Gotch took up outdoor painting. They settled in Newlyn in 1887.
In his early years at Newlyn he worked in a rural realist manner, painting pastoral scenes and landscapes. A visit to Paris and Florence in 1891 and 1892 changed his style: he moved largely away from that approach towards a Pre-Raphaelite manner, with brighter colours and a return to allegorical genre painting. His first work in this vein was My Crown and Sceptre (1892). He combined symbolic female figures, decorative Italian textiles and the ordered composition of early Renaissance art, which finally brought him recognition. Many of these compositions show young girls, and his daughter Phyllis often posed for him. Among his best-known works are Alleluia (1896), which the Tate acquired, and The Reading Hour and A Golden Dream, shown at the opening exhibition of the Newlyn gallery in 1895.
Gotch was a successful artist in his lifetime and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy in London. Beyond painting, he was active in the cultural life of Newlyn: he founded local industrial classes for young people and helped set up the art gallery, serving on its committee for the rest of his life. His work is held in collections in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and it remains the subject of academic study, although his name does not hold a prominent place in international histories of art.