Robert Manuel Cook FBA (4 July 1909 – 10 August 2000) was a classical scholar and classical archaeologist from England with expertise in Greek painted vases. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, the author of several academic texts and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1974, having been made a Fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in 1953.[1]
Biography
Robert Cook was born in Sheffield on 4 July 1909, the son of a clergyman and his wife, the Reverend Charles Robert and Mary Manuel Cook. After a period of home schooling and then boarding school, Cook was educated at Marlborough College (1923-9) and Clare College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first in Classics. He was awarded a Walston scholarship in 1932 and spent the next two years undertaking research in the British School at Athens.[1] In 1946, after pre-war lecturing positions at the University of Manchester and wartime service in the Civil Service, Cook took up the position of Laurence Reader in classical archaeology at Cambridge University, which he held until his elevation in 1962 to the Laurence Chair where he remained until his formal retirement in 1976. Cook published extensively during his career; his Greek Painted Pottery, first published in 1960, with a third edition published in 1997, has been described as "an essential volume in any library on ancient Greece".[2] Photographs attributed to Cook and annotated the British School Athens are held in the Conway Library whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.[3]
In 1938, Cook married Kathleen Porter (d.1979). The Cooks enjoyed travelling together and, in 1968, they published a joint work, Southern Greece: An Archaeological Guide. His younger brother was John Manuel Cook, also a noted scholar of antiquity.[1]
In retirement Cook acted as chairman of the British School at Athens (1983-1987). He died in Cambridge on 10 August 2000 aged 91.[4][5]
