This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Born in Hollywood, CA on Oct. 10, 1908, Dorothy Cooke, whose nickname
was “Doppy”, studied locally at the Chouinard Art Institute under
Barse Miller and Pruett Carter. She worked in Los Angeles as a
commercial illustrator until 1936 when she and husband artist Hardie
Gramatky moved to NYC.
She then illustrated for Jack & Jill magazines.
Mrs. Gramatky died in Westport, Connecticut on May 8, 2001.
Exhibitions:
Sunset Chamber of Commerce (LA), 1924
California WaterColor Society, 1929
California State Fair, 1929 (prize)
Arizona State Fair, 1929 (1st prize)
| Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Interview with the artist or his/her family; American Art Annual 1933; Who's Who in American Art 1936-40; Southern California Artists (Nancy Moure); Westport News, 5-18-2001 (obituary). | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
Biography from California Watercolor:
|  Dorothea Cooke (Gramatky), (1908-2001) was born in Hollywood,
California. She studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los
Angeles. Cooke graduated from Hollywood High School before
deciding not to go to college but to study her passion, art. Her
parents had come from New Hampshire where her father, Charles Prentice
Cooke, was an MIT graduate and her mother, Harrie Gertrude Edgerly
Cooke, attended Wellesley. Her father was a civil engineer who
helped design the “five finger drives” that opened up the San Fernando
Valley to being developed. She and her sister, Hellen, were both
chosen by legendary Stanford University professor Lewis B. Terman for
his landmark study on gifted children. Until she was in her 90s,
Dorothea was interviewed each decade for the study, which concluded
that gifted children were not misfits but tended to have happy,
productive lives and long marriages.
At Chouinard, Dorothea
studied with F. Tolles Chamberlin, Clarence Hinkle and Pruett
Carter. While there she met and fell in love with fellow artist
Hardie Gramatky. Later she recalled: “Hardie arrived at Chouinard
in 1928 after two years at Stanford. This handsome man with the
nicest smile stormed into our life class, leaped over the sawhorses
that we were using and started drawing fast and furiously. I really
should have had blinders on because it was very hard to
concentrate! He was so peppy.”
She did fine arts etchings on a printing press in her home while he
worked at Disney Company. The couple spent much time with their
best friends, Betty and Phil Dike, during their years in Southern
California’s Echo Lake district, and they married in 1932.
In 1936, Hardie and Doppy (as she was nicknamed) moved to New York
City, the Mecca of illustrators, and both found work immediately.
Dorothea (Doppy) did artwork for King Features and Jack & Jill magazine under her maiden name of Dorothea Cooke, and in 1940 she illustrated a children’s book about Stephen Foster called He Heard America Sing.
Doppy recalled: “For illustrating, I was paid the huge sum of
$150. We went out to dinner to celebrate one night in a little
place named Shima’s in the Village. We got the fanciest dinner
they had -– 85 cents -– and we thought we were really living!”
After
three miscarriages, Dorothea gave birth to a daughter, Linda Anne, and
the Gramatkys decided to move out of the City to Westport, Connecticut,
in 1946. A 1950s wife, Doppy was renowned for serving homemade
popovers and chili when the Fairfield Watercolor Group would meet
monthly at one of the 12 artists’ homes. Still doing covers and
illustrating for Jack & Jill for fifteen years, Dorothea
also did an illustration for a Spanish textbook that featured a woman
in a frilly nightgown in bed, and it caused the book to be banned in
Boston, a story that Hardie loved to tell! In the 1970s she illustrated
a book for the Xerox corporation, but it wasn’t until Hardie had died
and she had moved to New Jersey at age 74 that she began painting
watercolors for her own enjoyment. She won several awards in art
shows.
And then in 1989, G. P. Putnam & Sons publishers urged Dorothea and her daughter to finish Hardie’s last children’s book, Little Toot and the Loch Ness Monster,
posthumously. While Linda edited the manuscript, Dorothea painted
two original full-color illustrations for the book and also added
watercolor background to several charcoal sketches that Hardie had
done. Actress and producer Shelley Duvall chose to animate the
book for her Emmy-nominated television series on Showtime, Bedtime
Stories. In the years following the publication of the book,
Dorothea joined her daughter in traveling “from Maine to California”
giving talks at schools and libraries, where her bright eyes and
youthful enthusiasm and energy enthralled everyone.
With senile dementia, she moved back to the Connecticut house in 1998 to live with her family until her death at age 92.
Biography by daughter Linda Gramatky Smith
CaliforniaWatercolor.com |
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