Peter G. Cook ’37

EMINENT PORTRAIT and landscape painter and ace hockey player Peter Cook died Sept. 22, 1992, of cancer. He leaves his wife of 54 years, Joan; three sons, Peter '60, John '63, and Stephen '66; a daughter Pauline; and 15 grandchildren, underlining his 50th yearbook comments on the importance of family.

Peter attended St. Mark's, where he was on the football, hockey, and baseball teams, active in dramatics and publications, and a St. Mark's scholar. He majored in architecture at Princeton, was Phi Beta Kappa, played on the hockey team, and rowed crew. He was a member of Ivy Club and was awarded the William B. Blackwell Cup for Sportsmanship, Play and influence in hockey.

Peter's continued his studies, in art, at the National Academy of Design in N.Y.C., and in 1939 he was awarded a scholarship by the Pulitzer trustees as the "most promising and deserving art student in America." In 1944 he exhibited at the National Academy of Design and was awarded the Julius Hallgarten Prize for his painting "Weeds and Corn." Thereafter he was showered with honors too numerous to be listed here. By 1991 he had painted some 2,000 portraits, including those of Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson 1879, two presidents of the Seeing Eye, Pa Rolfe of The Hill, Hobey Baker'14, Bill Bonthron, and George Shultz '42.

Peter continued hockey team play until 1964 and coached Princeton freshman hockey from 1955 to 1966~

As set forth in THE PRINCETON PACKET in 1981: "He's a Renaissance man, best known as an artist, but as comfortable with a hoe, hammer, hockey stick, tennis racket, or clarinet as he is with a paint brush."

The Class of 1937