Washington Bogart Cooper was the most popular portrait artist in all of Nashville’s history.

To be fair, that isn’t saying much. Obviously the city isn’t exactly known for its famous visual artists and, moreover, he arrived on the scene at a very particular time in its history. To understand what the Nashville was like during Cooper’s time, all you need to know is that he was there more or less 10 years after Nashville’s first steamboat and 10 years before the city was made the state capital. So it is possible that the reason he was so popular was that he was the only portrait artists for about 200 miles in any direction. However, despite his isolation, he produced work on par with that of his city-oriented contemporaries, such as Thomas Sully and Chester Harding.

Even with this running head start on the Tennessee portrait market, Cooper wasn’t without some notable skills. In his prime it was said that he did around thirty-five portraits a year, or one every ten days, which is a miraculous rate for any artist. Through this he would earn the title “Man of 1000 Portraits,” even though, if you do the math, he would have likely done more than twice this many over the course of his career. Additionally, he did all this as a self-taught artist, a fact that is made even cooler when you learn that he took a portion of the proceeds from his work and used it to fund his brother who was getting an art education in europe - a move that I think qualifies as one of the most loving and generous flexes of all time.

So, Mr. Cooper’s fame is not without some merit and, when you look at Cooper's place in history, it is clear that it's really important that he made his mark in the game when he did. Within Cooper’s life time he would see the invention of the wet-collodion process, a photography technique that would make quality photographs accessible to the masses. This would literally be invented right at the end of his professional career, creating a whole new breed of artist, men such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, that would capture the future in entirely new ways. Luckily enough for Cooper, he got out right before this happened, leaving him unscathed by the new technology.