Honouring the cathedrals of the countryside

Artist Michael Cooper has brought the beauty of the West Country to the world over decades of capturing rural life on canvas. Now retired at 83, he tells JANET HUGHES how he's glad he chose to live his schoolboy dream

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WHEN Michael Cooper was a 15-year-old grammar schoolboy he was assured that despite his obvious talent for drawing, becoming an artist was an impractical dream. That he should follow his father into banking instead.

At one point, after a run of particularly bad luck when he drove out to Wookey Hall to pitch for a commission without having the petrol money for the return journey, that probably seemed like good advice.

But now, at the age of 83, he can finally retire and tend to his bonsai trees knowing that he didn't end up penniless, he is nearing his diamond wedding anniversary and his paintings are hanging on walls across the world. From an Attorney General's office in the Falklands, to a distillery in Fife, from a farm in Devon to a restaurant in the Australian outback, at any one time someone somewhere is probably looking at a bucolic scene painted by Michael Cooper.

More than likely that scene will be an image from the West Country, which has provided the Somerset artist with constant inspiration for his paintings that captured a rapidly disappearing rural idyll. His most popular works not only stand as a gloriously detailed record of old farmhouses, tractors and barns that were once such a common feature of the landscape, they captured the traditions, characters and simple everyday life of the countryside.

Threshing Day, one of his favourites, showed Harold Wright from Compton Dundon in Somerset helping his workers with the sheaves of corn generations of his family have used to thatch cottages in the area.

The cider orchard collection features Marcus Govier, a well-known farmer who Michael spotted driving a "little grey Fergie" in the lanes around Glastonbury. Marcus later admitted his early reticence about letting Michael paint his old Ferguson workhorse was because he thought the artist who followed him back to his yard was "some strange bloke going around painting people's tractors for them".