Mr Cook, who had resigned the previous week as director of the Museum, had been suffering from a highly debilitating illness that forced him to reluctantly give up his directorship of the museum the week before.
He told friends he had been undertaking stem cell treatment for a problem associated with Alzheimer’s disease - paradoxically the killer of knowledge and understanding which Mr Cook had pursued.
Cook, who had also become active in Caroline MacDowell's Culture Concept, a broader educational endeavour; and who was becoming known as a philanthropist on a more personal level within the trade, had maintained a quick wit and sharp mind to the end.
Cook began his education in antiques, especially the whereabouts and provenances of much of Australia’s moveable cultural heritage, in an intense career in the antiques industry which began in 1972.
In that year Cook, who had been a hairdresser, began working for Paul Kenny in Kenny’s antique shop in Paddington. “He was like a sponge but in the very nicest sort of way”, Mr Kenny now a manufacturer of reproduction furniture in an outer Sydney suburb told the Australian Art Sales Digest’s Terry Ingram.
Cook, who came from good honest Australian stock in Wauchope in Northern NSW, absorbed everything he was told, Kenny said. Cook’s sister Michelle, who has been sending out the invitations to Tuesday’s “wake” was very chuffed with his achievements. So was "Uncle Bob" who often helped Cook out in the shop to the delight of clients but who also died, earlier this year.
He brought new life into an industry during and after its great period of excess in the 1980s and continued to enhance it while it clung to dull brown furniture with characters to match.
He was from a different world to the northern NSW backwoods although awareness of the region’s early timber industry may have underwritten some of his interest in furniture.
In the course of trading and his personal life Cook enjoyed stories of the foibles and peccadillos of members of Sydney and Melbourne society which he gathered assiduously by his presence at some of the wildest parties ever thrown Down Under and to which he had been invited.
While most will be distressed at his passing - such was his charm and ebullience - others paid tribute to his discretion, his conversation seldom mundane. He let listeners fill in the blanks.
What happened in certain in venues stayed in those venues - except eye-brow raising stories which had friends and colleagues hanging on his every word. He was never a bore nor a snob except for the basic affectations of the industry, which had to be observed while he hung out with the very finest of Sydney society.
And while he soaked up information on the history of Sydney and Melbourne’s society that would have been incredibly useful in his industry, he had a genuine interest in learning about the background to his stock, and in this he was encyclopaedic.
His ambitions to make a career at the upper end of the antiques and art market surfaced in his first public splash participation in and promotion of an exhibition, “The Inspired Spirit” which was held in a large villa near the Paddington Police Station in conjunction with Richard Nagy, at that time a young art vendor who was to become one of the giants of the London art trade with a gallery in Mayfair.
Instead of merely carrying around a bunch of transparencies of works held by overseas dealer colleagues, he invited them to send the works for sale in Australia.
Many other dealers tried bringing out works on consignment but nearly all were faced with the difficulty of persuading potential buyers that they were not being offered “Europe’s seconds” or were being made to pay too much for its firsts.
Cook was very persuasive, managing to obtain the backing of old and new moneyed individuals in his several shuffles between impressive premises which included his long tenancy in Queen Street Woolahra, Paddington’s former Red Lion Laundry factory on Jersey Road and the Municipal Electric Light Co. in Redfern – a fine Art Deco building, but located in a suburb that might not yet have been upmarket enough for his clients.
Finally, as he became fully involved in the Roche Foundation, he moved to Darlinghurst or Rushcutters Bay as he liked to call it.
His love of the triumphs of the saleroom may have been intensified by the inclusion of Old Masters on which large profits were being made. The Paddington exhibition included a painting by the “Dutch Caravaggio” Gerritt van Honthorst which had been bought at a Paris auction for the equivalent of $100,000. It reportedly sold for the equivalent of $2.4 million.
However, Warren Anderson, the West Australian property developer who cleared the land for many a Coles or K Mart store and bought heavily from the exhibition, took a bath on some of the offerings when in the recessed 1990s forced resales were made in California where Anderson’s antique gun collection was sold by Butterfields, a local Californian auction house which was taken over by Bonham’s.
In 2007 he accomplished a variation of this exercise with a table that Eileen Bond, wife of the share shuffler Alan Bond had purchased for about $36,000. The table was a fine piece of antique marquetry incorporating a piece of wood from a one of Captain Cook’s ships. One of the global auction houses had it for sale for $150,000.
Auctioneer Tim Goodman, who had joined Bond in establishing aspects of its provenance brought it to the attention of Cook and told him to buy it. Cook, beguiled perhaps of the notion of having if only briefly a piece of “Cookiana” bought it – albeit for a client and also researched it and came up with the romantic story of its original presentation to Mrs Cook, the wife of the Captain.
It is now on display on loan in the National Library of Australia after being sold by Cook through Goodman for $550,000.
Mr Goodman said Mr Cook also had a considerable ability as an arbitrator. Cook played a part in the settlement of the dispute over who should sell the second tranche of Warren Anderson’s “Owston Collection” of art and antiques when it came onto the market through the creditor action.
Although Goodman lost the collection to Bonhams he acknowledged Cook’s handling of the dispute. Cook was generous in making available to buyers the results of his research in cataloguing the collection and acting as an intermediary.
Fine antique furniture was often on show at his gallery in Sydney’s Queen Street in his middle years of trading. Like his earlier exhibition, “The Inspired Spirit” this demonstratedd his determination to inter-nationalise the sale of art and antiques in a taste xenophobic Australian market. Also like “The Inspired Spirit” Cook continued to receive and show works for the overseas antique trade such as Mallett's in London.
Cook had come into the South Australian circle through the Roche’s property interests in Queen Street Woollahra, then Sydney’s leading street of antique shops where the sale of one fine piece of furniture or porcelain could produce a profit that paid the rent for a year, hence the Roche interest.
The Queen Street shop was where he was best known and he was there during the final years of the eminence of Queen Street as the street of trade's Sydney "street of streets".
Cook was an affable spirit but not all in the trade praised his progress. Like all such traders he had a few descriptions which were a little awry. Unlike the man whose business model he claimed to worship, the Tasmanian dealer John Hawkins, he was mainly a buyer spending other people's money.
A much better relationship by far – indeed more than that and a personal one – was achieved by Cook for the acclaimed architect and decorator Thomas Hamel who came to Australia and became his life partner, or at least part of life – as these, if not all - relationships now tend to be.
His biggest business catch was a longstanding and enduring connection with Mr Roche. This link saw Cook seated at major sales in New York, London and Paris with his assistant, Lucas Campbell. He also travelled to Russia in pursuit of antiques and in the company of other business supporters who had interests they were pursuing there.
He enjoyed the stardom of securing an item such as a rare Napoleonic pistol for Roche at a Bonhams sale in London and making many purchases for others at overseas sales.
At a Christie's sale of French Furniture and Old Master Paintings, in London held on behalf of Maurice Segoura, a leading Parisian dealer who had closed his doors, he would secure much supporting material for the museum. The purchases included a painting of Napoleon's troops in battle for $US114,000 a vase for $US15,600, a pair of Chinese vases for $US19,200, a Louis XV chair for $US28,800, a pair of wall lights for $US15,600, and a painting by Van Loo for $US60,000.
The Battle of Nazareth by Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (Paris 1755-1830) was the most expensive acquisition, its $US114,000 purchase price significantly above the $US30,000 to $US50,000 estimates.
A larger version of this subject, painted by the same artist, was acquired by the French government and exhibited in the Galerie Historique, Versailles.
The oval portrait by Van Loo is a delightful portrait of a lady, bust-length, in a fur-trimmed blue silk dress, was sold without reserve but Cook had to pay more than three times the top estimate.
This was all in a day's work for a boy from Wauchope without a university education.
The Memorial service on April 11 is at 2 pm for 2.30 pm.
