Caroline Mary Thompson Coon (born 23 March, 1945) is an English artist known for her paintings, feminist political activism, writing, and photography. After coming to prominence first as a leader of the British Underground counterculture of the 1960s, and then in the vanguard of the punk rock movement of the 1970s, she is recognised today as a foremost figurative painter in contemporary British art, with her work included in landmark survey exhibitions at London's Hayward Gallery and Tate Britain.

While at Central School of Art in 1967, Coon co-founded the charity Release, which provided legal services for those arrested on drug possession charges. In the 1970s, earning money as a freelance journalist, including writing for Melody Maker, she became conscious of the zeitgeist change in youth culture which she christened the punk rock movement. Her photographs of the early punk days are now published and exhibited throughout the world. Coon managed The Clash from 1978 to 1980, through two significant tours in the UK and North America.

Since the early 1980s, Coon's primary focus has been her oil paintings which regularly feature women and men, both clothed and nude, in scenes that often contest the misogyny of patriarchy. With reference points as varied as Pauline Boty, Lorenzo Lotto, Artemisia Gentileschi and Henri Rousseau, her work has been compared to that of Paul Cadmus, Tamara de Lempicka, Gluck and Christian Schad. Since 2022, she has been represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery.

Caroline Coon was born in London and raised on her parents' farm outside Maidstone, Kent. The eldest child and only girl in her family, she grew up surrounded by the paintings of her great-uncle, the artist Frank Moss Bennett, which contributed to her interest in art. From the age of five, she was sent as a boarder to the Legat Ballet School and trained by Russian teachers in a method which included yoga. At age ten she went to Sadler's Wells Ballet School, which later became the Royal Ballet School. As Coon told writer Christiana Spens in 2021; "…from an early age, I had this contrast between the patriarchal family home with the lies, and this other arena, where women worked as artists, and got paid for it. So intellectually, I had these contrasting worlds with which to feed into what I was going to become as an adult." Her parents moved the family to Northamptonshire in 1960.

After leaving the Royal Ballet School in London in 1961, the 16 year-old Coon took on a variety of jobs to earn a living as she continued her education to secure a place on a pre-diploma fine art course. She worked as a house model at various fashion brands including Alexon, Strelitz, and Norman Hartnell. An incident with the police – she forged her father's signature on a passport application form – necessitated Coon's return to Northamptonshire where she lived with her grandmother, attending a secretarial course by day and completing her A-level Art by night. She was accepted into the fine art pre-diploma at the Northampton School of Art in 1964.

In 1965, she enrolled at Central College of Art in London. Coon's interest was primarily in figurative art at a time when abstract expressionism and the teachings of Clement Greenberg were favoured by the art world establishment. As she became increasingly politically active, she realised that figurative painting was the main means through which her art could express social commentary. To fund her studies, she worked as a glamour model for photographers like George Harrison Marks. In 1967, as Miss Mayfair in Mayfair Magazine, she appeared nude on the cover and as the centrefold, painted gold like actress Shirley Eaton in the Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).

At Central College of Art, one of Coon's tutors was the now renowned pop artist Derek Boshier. He introduced her to his friend and colleague, the seminal British pop artist Pauline Boty and her husband, the literary agent Clive Goodwin. Boty had appeared alongside Boshier in Ken Russell's 1962 television film Pop Goes The Easel for the BBC's Monitor series. Boty's art was to exert a powerful influence over Coon. After the young painter's untimely death from cancer in 1966, her widower Goodwin gave Boty's paints and brushes to Coon. Speaking to art historian Maria Elena Buszek in 2019, Coon said""he believed in me, I think. Whenever things got really tough, I could rely on the promise I made to myself after Boty died, to carry on where she left off. In a way, I've pulled through many a psychological and financial crisis and kept on painting in her honour."

Like Boty, as a fine art student Coon also did paid work in film and television. She appeared as an extra in both Blow Up (1966) and in the Vincent Price thriller The House of 1,000 Dolls (1967). She starred in Harrison Marks' erotic films Amour (1966) and The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1967). Alongside Boshier and Goodwin, she was cast as the Pre-Raphaelite model Annie Miller in Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno (1967), with Oliver Reed as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.