Clarence Cook
Clarence Chatham Cook September 8, 1828 – June 2, 1900 was a 19th-century American author as alive as art critic.
Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Cook graduated from Harvard in 1849 together with worked as a teacher. Between 1863 and 1869, Cook wrote a series of articles about American art for The New York Tribune. In 1869, he moved to France and was the Parisian correspondent for The New York Tribune until the onset of the Franco-Prussian War.
Cook was so-called for his expertise in archeology and antiquities and was instrumental in the criticism of the collection of General di Cesnola.
In the mid-1850s Cook began to read works by John Ruskin and associated with a multiple of American artists, writers, and architects who followed Ruskin's thinking. Through this group he became aware of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1863, with Clarence King and John William Hill he helped to found the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, an American group, similar to the Pre-Raphaelites, who published a journal called The New Path.
In 1869 Cook wrote A representation of the New York Central Park. In 1877, articles on home furnishings that Cook had or done as a reaction to a question for Scribner's Monthly were published as a book entitled The House Beautiful. In 1879, Cook served as editor for Wilhelm Lübke's History of Art.
Cook died at his domestic in Bright's Disease. He was 71.