Wickliffe Covington

Who was Wickliffe Covington?

Wickliffe Cooper Covington was an American painter, notable as a student of Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer. She was the daughter of Robert Wickliffe Cooper and Sarah Steele Cooper, but she never knew her father; he died a few weeks before she was born. Her father had been a highly-decorated Union Army cavalry officer during the Civil War, and after the war had been commissioned as a major in the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under the famous General George Armstrong Custer, but unfortunately Major Cooper was afflicted with severe alcoholism and shot himself on the Nebraska prairie while suffering a fit of delirium on June 8, 1867.

The young artist studied at Sayre Female Institute, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Art Students League of New York. She also studied art with James Carroll Beckwith, Kenyon Cox, William Merritt Chase and Wayman Elbridge Adams. She later taught art at Potter College for Young Ladies in Bowling Green, Kentucky. In 1892, she married Robert Wells Covington, an attorney. She died in Bowling Green on December 1, 1938.