Born: July 4th, 1944
Died: January 25th, 2025
Sculptor Michael Cooper FRBS (Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors) lived in the UK throughout his adult life, but his childhood years in the wilds of Connemara and later in Donegal always inspired his art and craft. The beaches near Dunlewy in Donegal – where his father Major Derek Cooper, OBE MC, had purchased a house after he returned from the second World War – were where he first experimented with whittling wood, sometimes under the eye of landscape artist Derek Hill.
Over the ensuing decades his body of work would include a four-ton gorilla carved in Belgian fossil marble for Lord Carrington’s Sculpture Garden in Buckinghamshire and a 7ft statue of 16th century pirate queen Grace O’Malley for Westport House, Co Mayo.
Cooper was born in 1944 in a little maternity hospital on Hatch Street in Dublin where his mother, Pamela Cooper (née Tulloch) was living while her husband was away in the war.
Soon after his birth, Michael was brought to live at his maternal grandparents’ home at Shanbolard House, near Cleggan, in Connemara. His older sister, Jennifer, had spent all of the war there with her grandparents, Doris and Kinmont Tulloch, and was very excited when Mick, as he was called by the family, arrived.
The richness of this natural world with all its freedoms would prove to be the genesis for much of his later work, which through further travels captured the mystique and unfettered beauty of the animal world. Regular stays at nearby Delphi Lodge engendered a love of fishing too. One of his first big commissions was a Sailfish while a piece entitled Salmon Leap was commissioned by Berkeley Square County Council, London.
First, though, Cooper spent a very unhappy time at Eton College before attending Heatherley School of Fine Art, London, between 1969 and 1971 and then studying under Anthony Gray. Cooper spent much of his working life in his studio in Buckinghamshire, near where his mother then lived.
Working in materials including marble, stone and bronze, he exhibited at a wide variety of venues from 1974. They included Regent’s Park Zoo, London, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Royal Academy, as well as many private galleries. Among his large-scale commissions were three life-size bears in Belgian fossil marble for Bicester retail village.
His lifelong friendship and camaraderie with his late brother-in-law the 11th Marquis of Sligo, Jeremy Browne of Westport House, led to much discussion, before he agreed to making the 7ft Portland stone sculpture of Grace O’Malley, with a second piece also cast in bronze (2003).
His Irish connections also led to a number of exhibitions and the commissioning of Irish Wolfhounds in bronze for the Kildare retail village.
Cooper’s work has been described as “figurative but stylised, giving his pieces a marvellous tactile quality”. They range from the monumental, to pieces that fit in the hand such as his small Orangutan and Camel.
A citation in the catalogue for his last major exhibition, Out of the Block at Gallery Pangolin in 2023 states: “Starting with a rough block using nothing but a chisel and sandpaper, Cooper brings incredible tactility and subtle sensuality to the sculptures he creates. Forms flow from one into another, magically suggesting a feline flank, a canine quizzicality, primate personality or pachyderm power.”
The sculptures included a bronze entitled Lemur, his Reclining Polar bear in marble, Seated Leopard in Kilkenny limestone, Small Orangutan in sterling silver. Significantly, the exhibition also included examples of another lifelong artistic endeavour, the human body, with Torso and Mother and Child, both in marble.
His Irish-born stepbrother Lord Grey Gowrie, a Conservative politician and minister for arts under Margaret Thatcher, wrote poetically about the sensuality and stillness of Cooper’s human torsos “caught by their own shape, unsullied by anything but regard”.
A permanent exhibition of Cooper’s work is on show at his wife’s restaurant, The Sir Charles Napier in Oxfordshire. Since early exhibitions in the Lad Lane Gallery in Dublin and the Municipal Gallery in Cork in 1977, his work has appeared in dozens of galleries across the UK, the US and Ireland.
His closeness to his sister Jennifer always ensured regular visits to the west of Ireland. Staying at Renvyle House Hotel with his family while heading off to Coynes of Tullycross for “a good pint of Guinness” was an important part of the ritual.
In September 2018, Cooper was delighted to walk his niece Alannah up the aisle in Holy Trinity Church, Westport. After Jeremy’s death in 2014, he was very supportive to his grief-stricken sister and her five daughters. With a philosophical outlook influenced by Sufism, he encouraged his sister to always remember: “We are in this world but we don’t have to be of this world.”
Michael Cooper is survived by his wife Julie, his children Lórien, Kate and Sam, his sister Jennifer, and wider family.
