Large oil on canvas portrait of a lady in a lace collar, signed lower right George E. Cook (1867-1930) and dated 1903. Born in New York, Cook eschewed the career path in law set out for him and pursued painting, studying with John Enneking in Boston at the age of twenty, and traveling to Europe in the late 1880s, where he taught at the Academie Julian in Paris. He returned to the United States to live in North Carolina in 1929, where much of his life's work was lost in a fire.
Presented in handsome and probably original period gilt wood and gesso frame. Approx. 35 1/4" x 30 1/2" (frame.) Some loss of gesso to frame.