Ebenezer Wake Cook, ‘The Post-Impressionists’

Wake Cook (1843-1926) was a landscape watercolour painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1875 until 1910. He was also the author of Anarchism in Art (1904) — an attack on modernism in art modelled on Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895). Together with Robert Ross, William Blake Richmond and Philip Burne-Jones, Cook saw in Post-Impressionism the symptoms of a moral decay in western civilisation, and his voice continued to be prominent for another two years condemning each new movement in art.