Barbara Latham was an exceptional artist of her time. She was well schooled, having studied at the Norwich Connecticut Art School, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the Arts Student League in Woodstock, New York. She was also an adventurous traveler. To gather inspiration for her illustrations, she traveled everywhere, from bicycling through Brittany with a friend, to taking a train to Taos, New Mexico where she found her future husband,
Howard Cook.

She spent the early part of her career in New York, where she worked for the Norcross Publishing Company and did illustration for Forum magazine and the New York Times Sunday magazine.

Latham, from the time of her first visit to Taos, created prints and paintings of New Mexico subjects: the Taos landscape, views of the town and themes depicting the seasons of rural life. A lithographer and etcher, she created wood engravings that have an intense, contrasting use of black and white. She also did pencil drawings and illustrated children’s books that were award winning.

Barbara Latham’s one-woman exhibitions include the Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Roswell museum, New Mexico and Weyhe Gallery, New York City. Her work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.