about the work

This tiny woodcut exhibits incredible detail for its size. 

about the artist

August Cook entered the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, now known as  PAFA, in 1917, a year after the death of Ashcan School artist Thomas Eakins. The college’s curriculum echoed that of traditional atelier training; students drew from plaster casts, then from live models and still lives – only moving on to the traditionally more serious disciplines of portraiture,  landscape, and figure painting after a long process of refinement and technical development. Cook may have acquired his taste for approaching the art process with discipline and rigor at PAFA, or his experiences there may have merely strengthened a pre-existing commitment to those values; but discipline, rigor, and deliberation characterized his life-long approach to both art education and art-making.