Career

John Paul Cooper was born on 3 October 1869. His father, John Harris Cooper, was a self-made man who began as an apprentice in the hosiery industry and ended up in the 1880s as a partner in Messrs Cooper, Corah and Sons based at St Margaret Works, Leicester. His mother, who was well-read and artistic, encouraged his childhood enthusiasms for literature, nature and drawing. The family lived at the Manor House, Rotherby in the 1870s before moving to Evington Hall, Leicester.

In 1888 he went to London to study architectural drawing and began a three-year apprenticeship with the architect, John Sedding. Although Gimson had left Sedding's office before the start of Cooper's apprenticeship, it was through the office circle that the two men met. Sedding's chief assistant, Henry Wilson, became Cooper's closest friend and introduced him to a variety of building crafts including gesso and plasterwork.

Cooper set up a studio workshop in Kensington, London in 1897. At about the same time his second cousin, May Morgan Oliver, also decided to take up craftwork professionally. Through his introduction, she joined the stained-glass workshop of Christopher Whall. From 1899 she worked with Cooper and they were married in 1901.

From 1901 to 1907 Cooper taught metalwork at Birmingham Municipal School of Art. His private work also expanded significantly and a small inheritance on the death of his father meant that he could give up teaching to concentrate on designing and making. He rented a house at Hunton, Kent not far from Wilson's studio and in 1910 built his own house, Betsom's Hill, near Westerham, Kent. His reputation both in Britain and overseas grew during the 1920s and he regularly exhibited watercolours as well as craftwork until his death in 1933.