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 The Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI (27 January 1850 – 11
April 1934), called 'Jack' by his family and friends, was a leading
English artist, and an author. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite
style, and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his
generation. Both his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry
Huxley. He studied painting at the Munich Academy where he
enrolled on 14 April 1875 (Register: 3145) at the age of 25.
Collier was from a talented and successful family. His
grandfather, John Collier, was a Quaker merchant who became a Member of
Parliament. His father (who was a Member of Parliament, Attorney
General and, for many years, a full-time judge of the Privy Council)
was created the first Lord Monkswell. He was also a member of the
Royal Society of British Artists. John Collier's elder brother,
the second Lord Monkswell, was Under-Secretary of State for War and
Chairman of the London County Council.
In due course, Collier became an integral part of the family of Thomas
Henry Huxley PC, sometime President of the Royal Society. Collier
married two of Huxley's daughters and was "on terms of intimate
friendship" with his son, the writer Leonard Huxley. Collier's
first wife, in 1879, was Marian (Mady) Huxley. She was a painter
who studied, like her husband, at the Slade School of Art and exhibited
at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. After the birth of their only
child, a daughter, she suffered severe post-natal depression and was
taken to Paris for treatment where, however, she contracted pneumonia
and died in 1887.
In 1889, Collier married Mady's younger sister Ethel Huxley.
Until the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 such a marriage
was not possible in England, so the ceremony took place in
Norway. Collier's daughter by his first marriage, Joyce, was a
portrait miniaturist, and a member of the Royal Society of Miniature
Painters. By his second wife he had a daughter and a son, Sir
Laurence Collier KCMG, who was the British Ambassador to Norway 1941-51.
Collier's range of portrait subjects was broad. In 1893, for
example, his subjects included the Bishop of Shrewsbury (Sir Lovelace
Stamer); Sir John Lubbock FRS; A N Hornby (Captain of the Lancashire
Eleven); Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield (Admiral and Arctic explorer).
His commissioned portrait of the future King George V as Master of
Trinity House in 1901 when Duke of York, and the Duke of Windsor when
Prince of Wales were his major royal portraits. The latter work
was hung in Durbar Hall, Jodhpur, Rajputana.
Other subjects included two Lord Chancellors (the Earl of Selborne in
1882 and the Earl of Halsbury) in 1897; The Speaker of the House of
Commons, William Gully, (1897); senior legal figures the Lord Chief
Justice Lord Alverstone (1912) and the Master of the Rolls Sir George
Jessel (1881).
Rudyard Kipling (1891); the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1884);
the actors J.L. Toole (1887) and Madge Kendal, Ellen Terry and Herbert
Beerbohm Tree (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) (1904); heads of
educational institutions such as the Master of Balliol Edward Caird
(1904), the Warden of Wadham G.E. Thorley (1889) and the Provost of
Eton (1897). Soldiers such as Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum
(1911) and Field Marshall Sir Frederick Haines (1891); two Indian
maharajahs, including the Maharajah of Nepal (1910); and scientists
including Charles Darwin (1882), the artist's father-in-law Professor
Huxley (1891), William Kingdom Clifford, James Prescott Joule and
Michael Foster. Clark reports a total of thirty-two Huxley family
portraits during the half-century after his first marriage.
A photocopy of John Collier's Sitters Book (made in 1962 from
the original in the possession of the artist's son) can be consulted in
the National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive and Library. This is the
artist's own handwritten record of all his portraits, including name of
subject, date, fee charged, and details of any major exhibitions of the
picture in question.
Collier died in 1934. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography
(volume for 1931–40, published 1949) compares his work to that of Frank
Holl because of its solemnity. This is only true, however, of his many
portraits of distinguished old men — his portraits of younger men,
women and children, and his so-called "problem pictures", covering
scenes of ordinary life, are often very bright and fresh.
His entry in the Dictionary of Art (1996 vol 7, p569), by
Geoffrey Ashton, refers to the invisibility of his brush strokes as a
"rather unexciting and flat use of paint" but contrasts that with
"Collier's strong and surprising sense of colour" which "created a
disconcerting verisimilitude in both mood and appearance".
The Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (1997) describes his portraits as "painterly works with a fresh use of light and colour".
A self-portrait of 1907 have been preserved in the Uffizi in Florence,
which presumably commissioned it as part of its celebrated collection
of artists’ self portraits.
Other pictures may be seen in houses and institutions open to the
public: a large and striking painting of the murderess Clytemnestra is
in the Guildhall Gallery of the City of London. The Death Sentence
was given by the widow of the artist to Wolverhampton Art
Gallery. His portrait of the Earl of Onslow (1903), is at Clandon
Park, Surrey (National Trust). His portrait of Sir Charles
Tertius Mander, first baronet, is at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire.
Reproductions of many others, from various collections, may be
consulted in the John Collier box in the National Portrait Gallery
Heinz Archive and Library, and a very good selection is published in The Art of the Honourable John Collier
by W.H. Pollock (1914). His work was also included in the Great
Victorian Pictures exhibition mounted by the Arts Council in 1978.
Collier's views on religion and ethics are interesting for their
comparison with the views of Thomas and Julian Huxley, both of whom
gave Romanes lectures on that subject. In The religion of an
artist (1926) Collier explains "It [the book] is mostly concerned with
ethics apart from religion... I am looking forward to a time when
ethics will have taken the place of religion... My religion is really
negative. [The benefits of religion] can be attained by other means
which are less conducive to strife and which put less strain on upon
the reasoning faculties." On secular morality: "My standard is frankly
utilitarian. As far as morality is intuitive, I think it may be reduced
to an inherent impulse of kindliness towards our fellow citizens." His
views on ethics, then, were very close to the agnosticism of T.H.
Huxley and the humanism of Julian Huxley.
On the idea of God: "People may claim without much exaggeration that
the belief in God is universal. They omit to add that superstition,
often of the most degraded kind, is just as universal." And "An
omnipotent Deity who sentences even the vilest of his creatures to
eternal torture is infinitely more cruel than the cruellest man." And
on the Church: "To me, as to most Englishmen, the triumph of Roman
Catholicism would mean an unspeakable disaster to the cause of
civilization." And on non-conformists: "They have a superstitious
belief in the actual words of the Bible which is very dangerous".
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Collier_(artist)
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