Decorated initial W

illiam Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951), illustrator and watercolourist, was the son of Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, who was an English botanist and mycologist. W. Cubitt Cooke exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute, and the Royal Academy. He is chiefly remembered for his work on J. M. Dent's 1892 edition of the Complete Novels of Jane Austen in ten volumes. He provided a total of thirty lithographs, three per volume, with the four longer Austen novels split into two volumes each. There was little that was novel in his approach to Austen; he tended, in fact, to choose exactly the same scenes for illustration as his predecessor, painter and illustrator Ferdinand Pickering (1811–circa 1882).

In the last decade of the nineteenth century he illustrated all of Charles Lever's novels, which were published in the United States by Little, Brown (Boston). In his short series, he responds to Phiz's earlier whimsical engravings for Chapman and Hall.

Works Illustrated

Now online — ***

Paintings


Victorian
Web

Visual
Arts

Illustra-
tion

W. Cubitt
Cooke

Created 20 June 2022