Casket by John Paul Cooper
A fine shagreen (skate) covered casket designed and made by John Paul Cooper.
The walnut carcass is covered with carefully chosen sheets of shagreen and bound with flattened silver wires of various designs. Within, the catch is covered by a silver metal plate stamped with Cooper’s mark ‘J.P.C’ and a plaque,attached to the inside of the lid is engraved to the effect that this casket was ‘Presented to Colonel Theodore Dyke Acland by nursing staff……of the Special Surgical Hospital Shepherd’s Bush……..31st December 1923.’
8 5/8 in x 4 in x3 1/4 in
John Paul Cooper (1869-1931) trained as an architect for a number of years and worked in the offices of J. D. Sedding and Henry Wilson. In 1897, on Wilson’s advice, he took up metalwork. He specialised in the use of unusual materials, notably shagreen, which he began using in 1903, long before it became fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s. Cooper taught at the Birmingham School of Art, where he was head of the metal work department from 1904 to 1907 later moving to Kent where he finally set up workshop in his house, which he designed himself, at Westerham. He is considered by the Victoria and Albert Museum (amongst others) to be a leading craftsman in the Arts and Crafts Movement, specialising in metalwork and jewellery. His approach to decoration was “magnificent and unusual”.
Theodore Dyke Acland (1851 – 1931) was an English medical doctor, surgeon and author, a leading London medical practitioner and one of the Physicians-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. For many years he was the Medical adviser to the government of Sudan, being awarded in 1931 (posthumously) the Order of the Nile for his services to the Sudan.
