A consummate etcher, James Fowler Cooper was also a farmer in rural South Carolina, giving him a firsthand view of the agrarian South and the people who worked the land. He also frequented the nearby coast at Pawleys Island.
When Cooper was born in Indiantown, South Carolina, it was an agricultural area with a population of less than 2400. As its name implies, it was the site of an American Indian village; Scots-Irish settlers arrived early in the eighteenth century. The Cooper family farm—like many in the state—grew cotton and tobacco, as well as corn, to feed their cattle and hogs. James Cooper enrolled at the University of South Carolina in Columbia at age seventeen and majored in English and Latin. He graduated with honors and was awarded a certificate of art by Katherine Heyward, who described him as “a conscientious, intelligent student, a gentleman with a lively sense of humor.” While at the university, Cooper also received instruction from Elizabeth White, a printmaker from Sumter, South Carolina, who later befriended him and let him use her etching press. In 1928 he went north for two years to study at the Art Students League in New York where his instructor Boardman Robinson stressed draftsmanship. This emphasis was important later when Cooper took up etching, a skill he researched and basically taught himself.
Also studying at the League during the late 1920s was Lamar Dodd, and he and Cooper became good friends. They both lived at the YMCA and had the same instructors. After Dodd moved to Athens to teach at the University of Georgia, he often joined Cooper at Pawleys Island. Dodd helped him make contacts with dealers and also offered his colleague a teaching position at the university, which was declined. In 1941 they traveled together to New England, and they both exhibited with the Southern States Art League, alongside Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, another accomplished South Carolina printmaker. In 1982 Dodd wrote in the foreword to a monograph on Cooper’s etchings: “There is a fundamental truthfulness in his work, a disdain for mediocrity, a constant probing for moral values, and an integrity that deserves our appreciation and respect.”
For the exhibition American Art Today at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Dodd’s painting Copperhill was selected for the painting division, and Cooper’s etching Saturday Night was one of four hundred prints selected. Prints by such artists as Verner, Anna Heyward Taylor, Alfred Hutty, Caroline Durieux, and Blanche Lazzell were also chosen.
Cooper’s first etching was the size of a postage stamp and depicted a plowman. Over time he became proficient with the medium and experimented with aquatint and drypoint. Many of his scenes are bathed in theatrical light, frequently enhanced by inky darks contrasting the white of his paper. His biographer, Boyd Saunders, wrote the following about Cooper’s method: “His work on his plates was painstaking and exacting and … he labored much over subtleties and nuances that another would have scarcely noticed. … All of his work speaks eloquently with the authority of firsthand experience, profound knowledge of the subject, and deeply felt conviction.”