George Cooke, To-Ka-Con, 1837. Lithograph, 19 x 13 inches. Photograph by: Tad Fruits

Like Charles Bird King, George Cooke worked for many years as an itinerant painter, traveling throughout the eastern seaboard in the early 1820s seeking portrait commissions.

Born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, Cooke was interested in art even as a child. He once claimed that at age three he “evinced a peculiar talent for drawing; at six or seven, I invented my own colors. . . . Painting now became a passion with me.” Nevertheless, he turned to painting for a living only after he failed at several business ventures. He lacked King’s formal training, but taught himself by copying other artists’ portraits before becoming King’s student and close friend in 1824.

In 1826, Cooke traveled to Europe, visiting Italy, France, and England. He remained in Europe for six years. While there, he copied Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic paintings such as Théodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa.

After returning to America, Cooke resumed his life as an itinerant painter, depicting residents of Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama in portraits ranging from busts to full-length, life-size paintings. By the late 1840s, he had become one of the South’s best-known painters.

In 1837, when King found himself unable to fulfill a large commission by Thomas McKenney to paint prominent Indians attending an intertribal congress in Washington, D.C., he asked Cooke to assist him. Although not as skillful a painter as King, Cooke’s work was competent and was accepted by McKenney. Cooke also painted McKenney’s portrait and that of his son.

Among the other portraits that Cooke painted for McKenney was To-Ka-Con (Tokacou). It was reproduced as a lithograph in McKenney and Hall’s portfolio, The Indian Tribes of North America, published in 1838.

In the early 1840s, while in New Orleans, Cooke met and befriended Daniel Pratt, a well-to-do Alabama manufacturer. Pratt built a gallery at his home in Prattville, Alabama (a town he had founded), to display Cooke’s paintings. He then commissioned the artist to paint a 17 by 23 foot canvas depicting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. For several years the framed oil painting was thought to be the largest in the world. (In 1867, Pratt donated the painting to the University of Georgia in Athens.)

Cooke died of cholera in 1849 while visiting New Orleans. Not long afterward, Pratt’s gallery deteriorated and was torn down, and Cooke’s paintings were dispersed. Cooke was buried in Prattsville, in the Pratt family cemetery.