SAMUEL COOK, ARTIST, 389 
SAMUEL COOK, ARTIST. 
BY MR. W. EASTLAKE. 
(Read January 27th, 1881.) 
Berrore reading my paper, I desire to say that I have prepared it 
at the express wish of several members of this Institution. In 
doing so I have felt, on the one hand, that perhaps no one living 
could give more information concerning the life and works of 
Samuel Cook than myself, having had exceptional advantages 
and opportunities of obtaining such information. On the other 
hand, I have been very conscious that all available materials 
relating to so very uneventful a life as Cook’s would barely make 
up a lecture that would interest a general audience. I have 
therefore been compelled to introduce many matters that may be 
deemed trivial, though even these will be found to connect them- 
selves, either directly or indirectly, with my subject. 
Samuel Cook was born at Camelford, in Cornwall, in the year 
1806. He was the child of a poor woman whose mother kept a 
bakehouse in that town. Whilst very young he went to a little 
school kept by a Mr. Caleb Hender, where he learnt to read and 
write ; and he never received any other schooling. ven at this 
early age the passion for drawing had possession of him, for he 
used to draw with a bit of slate on the slate-stone steps of the 
school door (birds in profile, and other simple subjects) ; and it is 
recorded that at the age of six or seven he bought or begged at 
the druggist’s bits of indigo, rose-pink, gamboge, and yellow ochre, 
and tried to paint with them. 
At the age of eight or nine he was bound apprentice by the 
parish to Messrs. Pearse, woollen manufacturers, at Camelford. 
Part of his duty at the factory was to feed a machine called a 
“ scribbler” with wool, and in the intervals of this labour the boy 
was frequently observed to be drawing with a piece of chalk on 
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