On this day in 1850 the Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI, leading English artist, and an author, was born. 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 at the age of 25. Colliers 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 Marshal Sir Frederick Haines (1891); two Indian maharajahs, including the Maharajah of Nepal (1910); and scientists including Charles Darwin (1882), the artists father-in-law Professor Huxley (1891), William Kingdom Clifford, James Prescott Joule and Sir Michael Foster (1907). Clark reports a total of thirty-two Huxley family portraits during the half-century after his first marriage. A photocopy of John Colliers Sitters Book (made in 1962 from the original in the possession of the artists son) can be consulted in the Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. This is the artists 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.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 11:00:01 +0000
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