August Cook entered the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, now known as  PAFA, in 1917, a year after the death of Ashcan School artist Thomas Eakins. The college’s  curriculum echoed that of traditional atelier training; students drew from plaster casts, then from live models and still lives – only moving  on to the traditionally more serious disciplines of portraiture,  landscape, and figure painting after a long process of refinement and  technical development. Cook may have acquired his taste for approaching  the art process with discipline and rigor at PAFA, or his experiences  there may have merely strengthened a pre-existing commitment to those  values; but discipline, rigor, and deliberation characterized his  life-long approach to both art education and art-making.