John Collier (1850 - 1934). John Maler Collier 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 starting in 1875. Collier was from a talented and successful family. His grandfather, John Collier, was a Quaker merchant who became a Member of Parliament. His father, Robert, 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, President of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885. 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 Huxley. She was a painter who studied, like her husband, at the Slade 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. Collier's daughter by his first marriage, Joyce, was a portrait miniaturist, and a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. 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. By his second wife he had a daughter and a son, Sir Laurence Collier, who was the British Ambassador to Norway 1941-51. Collier's range of portrait subjects was broad. In 1893, for example, his subjects included Lovelace Stamer, Bishop of Shrewsbury; Sir John Lubbock FRS; A N Hornby; Edward Augustus Inglefield. His commissioned portrait of the Duke of York as Master of Trinity House in 1901, and the Prince of Wales were his major royal portraits. The latter work was hung in Durbar Hall, Jodhpur, Rajputana. Other subjects included two Lord Chancellors in 1897; The Speaker of the House of Commons, William Gully,; senior legal figures the Lord Chief Justice Lord Alverstone and the Master of the Rolls Sir George Jessel. Rudyard Kipling; the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; the actors J.L. Toole and Madge Kendal, Ellen Terry and Herbert Beerbohm Tree; heads of educational institutions such as the Master of Balliol Edward Caird, the Warden of Wadham G.E. Thorley and the Provost of Eton. Soldiers such as Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Field Marshal Sir Frederick Haines; two Indian maharajahs, including the Maharajah of Nepal; and scientists including Charles Darwin, the artist's father-in-law Professor Huxley, William Kingdom Clifford, James Prescott Joule and Sir 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 can be consulted in the Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. 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 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, 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 describes his portraits as painterly works with a fresh use of light and colour. Sixteen of John Collier's paintings are now in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and two are in the Tate Gallery. Four of the National Portrait Gallery paintings were in December 1997 on display: John Burns, Sir William Huggins, Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. A 1907 self-portrait has been preserved in the Uffizi in Florence which presumably commissioned it as part of its celebrated collection of artists' self-portraits.