oil on board, signed by both painters and dated 1854
framed

Handwritten label verso.
Note: According to Cooper, it was during a visit to Lee at his house in Devon that a mutual decision was made to '...paint some pictures conjointly'. Lee was to paint the landscape first and Cooper to introduce the animals - and, at Lee's insistence, to handle the financial arrangements. In the late 1840s both artists were at the height of their popularity and their exhibited collaborations in the Dutch tradition created a 'great sensation' at the Royal Academy when they first appeared. Prince Albert commented that they had '...caused a new want among patrons' and pronounced them 'the Beaumont and Fletcher of Art'. But by the mid-1850s, however, the art critics were tiring of their annual productions. To what extent the adverse criticism resulted from a gradual resentment from their fellow artists is uncertain. Lee's somewhat cavalier attitude to his profession, which he considered '...more as a pastime than as a business', together with the surprising rapidity with which both artists could produce large highly finished compositions of undoubted quality, combined with the long list of patrons eager to purchase the results, naturally rankled with artists of lesser talent. Lee and Cooper's nine consecutive years of exhibiting their collaborations at the Royal Academy and elsewhere ended in 1856. However, the fifteen Academy exhibits represent less than a quarter of their total joint productions. Both Cooper and Lee collaborated with other artists, but theirs was by far the most productive and successful partnership. Long after Lee's death at sea in 1879, Cooper was still being approached to add animals into Lee's early paintings.