Provenance: Bootham Collection, Wellington Purchased from Dunbar Sloane Auction, 31/10/1984

Captain Richard Tennant Cooper (1885-1957) was an established painter before he served in World War I with the British army. His paintings, such as this Windy Corner, Givenchy, suggest that in 1914 he was stationed in Flanders and may have been near Ypres, the subject of some his later paintings. These paintings graphically illustrate the horrors of a war-torn landscape and the effect of war on those who served. His approach is metaphoric using the way the wind is buffeting the soldiers to explain its effect on them. Some of his other wartime paintings are to be found in the National Army Museum and the National Signals Museum.

He was best known as a medical painter whose work showed the negative treatment of disease and treatments on the human body. These works are known for their metaphoric and phantasmic interpretations of the effect of disease on a human being.

Jenny Haworth Author Behind the Twisted Wire: New Zealand Artists in World War I