Lelia Maria Smith Cocke (18 March 1859–5 April 1899), portraitist, was born in Pavilion V at the University of Virginia, where her father, Francis Henry Smith, was a professor of natural philosophy. Her mother, Mary Stuart Harrison Smith, later wrote Lang Syne, or The Wards of Mount Vernon, a Tale of the Revolutionary Era (1889) and edited several collections by Virginia women, including the Virginia Cookery-Book (1885) and From Virginia to Georgia: A Tribute in Song (1895). Smith was tutored at home as a young girl and early in the 1870s attended the Wesleyan Female Institute, in Staunton. Her parents encouraged her desire to pursue art as a profession, and in September 1875, at age sixteen, she entered the Female Art School of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York City. There in 1877 Smith received a First Grade Certificate in drawing and engraving, the first prize—$30 in gold—for drawing from cast, and also an honorable mention in object drawing. The following year she won the second prize for portrait drawing and graduated with a certificate in drawing. Smith also studied privately with the painter Wyatt Eaton, who introduced her to such colleagues as the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and who included one of her drawings among the student artwork he sent to a Paris exposition in 1878.

After returning to Charlottesville in the summer of 1878, Smith divided her time between painting and teaching there and continuing art studies in New York. During the winter of 1881–1882 she began study with the muralist and illustrator Will H. Low. Clay modeling-techniques she learned in the studio of the Brooklyn art teacher Caroline V. Sanborn, a former classmate at Cooper Union, led to exhibition in 1883 of a plaque by Smith at the New York Society of Decorative Art.

In July 1883 Smith left the United States to pursue studies in Berlin, Germany, where her brother was serving as United States vice consul. She worked for several months with the German painter Karl Gussow until illness forced her to stop her lessons. In August 1884 Smith qualified as a copyist at the Königliche Gemäldegalerie, in Dresden, noted for its stringent requirements for and careful supervision of copyists.

Smith returned to Charlottesville in October 1884 and painted on commission for private clients and for the University of Virginia. Her noted works included portraits of the classicist and philologist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and of the geologist William Barton Rogers, her father's predecessor at the university. On 17 September 1885 at the University of Virginia she married Lucian Howard Cocke, an attorney and former mayor of Roanoke. Their two daughters and two sons included the attorney and banker Charles Francis Cocke. The family lived in Roanoke, where Lelia Smith Cocke continued to undertake commissions.

Cocke's canvases appeared in several state and national venues after her marriage. Her full-length portrait of John Albert Broadus, commissioned for presentation to Richmond College (later the University of Richmond), was exhibited at the 1888 Virginia Agricultural, Mechanical, and Tobacco Exposition. In 1893 at least two of her works, including portraits of her children, hung in the Virginia Pavilion of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Two years later the Virginia Room of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, featured several of her works, including a full-length portrait of her father-in-law, Charles Lewis Cocke, longtime superintendent of Hollins Institute (later Hollins University), which had commissioned the likeness. In 1962 Hollins mounted an exhibition of thirty-nine of Cocke's paintings, sketches, and studies. Her portraits hang in private collections and at Hollins University, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia Baptist Historical Society.

In addition to her professional artistic commitments, Cocke maintained an active civic life in Roanoke. In February 1894 she helped found the Margaret Lynn Lewis Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. The DAR staged a benefit performance of Cocke's four-scene play A Rose of Albemarle at the Roanoke Academy of Music in November 1895 to raise funds for rebuilding the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, which had burned the month before.

Cocke once again traveled to New York City late in 1898 in order to learn techniques of painting miniatures. After being ill for several months, Lelia Maria Smith Cocke died at her Roanoke residence on 5 April 1899 and was buried in the Cocke family cemetery at Hollins Institute. In 1903 her widower, who later served as general counsel of the Norfolk and Western Railway Company and as president of the Virginia State Bar Association, married Sarah Cobb Johnson Hagan, a writer who became the first president of the Woman's Civic Betterment Club in Roanoke.

Sources Consulted:
[Ulysse Desportes, comp.], An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Lelia Maria Smith Cocke (1962), including self-portrait; Lydia Taylor Pitman, "The Founder of the Margaret Lynn Lewis Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution" (typescript, 1955), and William B. Bagbey, "Lelia Maria Smith Cocke: Artist from the Lawn" (typescript, ca. 1992), both in Dictionary of Virginia Biography Editorial Files, Library of Virginia; Albemarle Co. Birth Register; Albemarle Co. Marriage Licenses; Cocke correspondence and commissions in possession of William B. Bagbey (2005), in Hollins University Archives, in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky., and in Papers of the Tucker, Harrison, and Smith Families, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Roanoke Daily Times, 23 Nov. 1895; death notices and obituaries in Roanoke Times, 6 Apr. 1899, 8 Apr. 1899, Charlottesville Daily Progress, 6 Apr. 1899, Richmond Dispatch, 7 Apr. 1899, and Richmond Times, 7 Apr. 1899; editorial tribute in Roanoke Times, 7 Apr. 1899; memorial by Sarah Ann Brock Putnam and William Henry Pleasants essay "Mrs. Cocke as an Artist" in Hollins Institute Spinster (1899), 23–24, 25–29.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Mary Lynn Bayliss.

How to cite this page:
Mary Lynn Bayliss, "Lelia Maria Smith Cocke (1859–1899)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cocke_Lelia_Maria_Smith, accessed [today's date]).

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