Obituary: Elaine Cooper, artist

Elaine Cooper, who has died at 94, was an artist and acknowledged expert on social history who was a stalwart of Leeds Civic Trust and Leeds Arts Centre and an honorary lifetime member of Leeds Fine Artists.

She trained at Leeds College of Art during the Second World War and was a versatile and prolific producer of life drawings, collages, paintings and ink drawings, which she turned out from a studio in Lawnswood, overlooking Otley Road.

Her framed pictures of historical costumes were sold to the former Schofields store in the centre of Leeds and she was the subject of several one-woman shows in the city. She also spent time as an artist for a fashion house which supplied to Harrods, but her main work was as an art teacher at Coburn High School and Leeds Polytechnic.

She left when education became comprehensive and worked as a technician with the museums and resources service in Wakefield.

She is survived by two nieces and a nephew. Her brother, who died in 2011, was the academic and author Joe Cooper, whose books included the definitive history of the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed to show fairies captured on film in a Yorkshire garden in 1917.