SAMUEL COOK, ARTIST. 395 
first original and poetic water-colour drawing, which he called ‘The 
Sailor’s Grave.” It was a large drawing, and represented a storm 
on a coast, with a single figure of a drowned sailor lashed to a 
mast. It was a sad and gloomy picture—cold and grey in tone, 
but most poetic in its feeling. This drawing at once marked him 
as a great coming artist. It was exhibited at the shop of Mr. 
Stone, a tailor, opposite the Branch Bank of England, and was 
bought by his friend, George Wightwick, who, some years after- 
wards, in a short memoir of Cook, wrote of it as follows: 
*“The excellence of the execution, considered as that of one wholly un- 
taught by educational process, or by any extended acquaintance with pictorial 
example, is marvellous, and the conception is even more extraordinary. The 
spectator is in the position of Ariel, safe in the midst of ocean fury. The 
picture is composed of a cloud, a rock, the valley of two giant waves, with a 
gull in the hollow, the small fragment of a wreck, and the corpse of a sailor. 
A body of water has just impinged upon the rock, and burst, as it were, into 
a white powder, which gives the light of the picture, while a piece of dark 
mast springs up in the midst. Never was there a finer instance of artist- 
magic than in this perpetuation of an awful instant. The picture is little 
else than a piece of mottled grey, with tints varying from white to dark 
green ; but every thing, from the glassy smoothness of the wave-valley to 
the wind-swept edges of the wave summits, is presented with a truth show- 
ing how the grandeurs of Nature require no idealization.” 
I have dwelt on this particular work of Cook’s because it was 
certainly the first that evinced at once the fulness of the artist’s 
genius. 
I cannot fix dates to all the incidents mentioned, but it could 
hardly have been far from the date of this drawing that Cook 
assisted in getting up some tableaux vivants at the Mechanics’ 
Institute, under the guidance of Col. H. Smith. The frame for 
these tableaux was painted by Cook to imitate a gold frame, and 
was, of course, on a large scale. Though present at the preparation 
and at the evening exhibition of these tableaux, the only one 
that I recollect was called “The Rising Sun,” in which a short 
old man was stretching his hand up to a very tall, thin, young 
one, supposed to be his son. The young man was Samuel Cook. 
Cook was much above the usual height, very slight, and delicate- 
looking ; his face long and thin, and his hands also; narrow- 
chested, and apparently one likely to suffer in the lungs. His 
portrait, by our fellow-townsman, Mr. Edward Opie, is an admir- 
able likeness of what Cook was when it was painted, in the year 
