John Collier

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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John Collier

by Marian Collier (née Huxley)
oil on canvas, circa 1882-1883
50 in. x 39 7/8 in. (1271 mm x 1080 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, 2007
Primary Collection
NPG 6811

Sitterback to top

  • John Collier (1850-1934), Portrait painter and writer on art. Sitter in 7 portraits, Artist or producer associated with 22 portraits.

Artistback to top

This portraitback to top

This portrait of the painter and art writer, John Collier, was made by his wife, Marian. It shows him at home with the tools of his trade standing before an easel on which a small portrait of Marian is positioned, making the work a kind of double portrait. Unlike her husband, however, she is not shown at work but as a fashionably-dressed woman, a contrast that recalls Victorian gender notions of active male and passive female. Originally titled An Artist at Work, it was exhibited at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1883 to favourable reviews: 'It is one thing to paint a portrait of some one who poses for the purpose more or less conventionally; it is quite another thing to seize the likeness, the attitude and the expression, of an artist, in his habit as he works. This is what Mrs Collier has done, and she has done it extremely well.'

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Subjects & Themesback to top

Events of 1882back to top

Current affairs

The Ashes Test cricket series is born. The series gets its name from a satirical obituary published in the English newspaper The Sporting Times, stating that English cricket had died and its cremated body was being taken back to Australia, after England, with batsmen W. G. Grace and Charles Studd, lost the first home match to Australia at the Oval.
The Married Women's Property Act is passed, securing equal property rights between married couples.

Art and science

Eadweard Muybridge, British photographer, exhibits his images of animal and human motion, captured with his 'zoopraxiscope', a motion-picture machine recreating movement by displaying individual photographs in rapid succession, at the Royal Academy and Royal Institution. His studies and inventions contributed to the development of motion pictures, with E.J. Marey and the Lumiere brothers acknowledging his impact.

International

The Zioinist movement begins, with the first wave of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, at this time part of the Ottoman empire. The Jewish people were in Diaspora, spread across the world, and Palestine, the place of Jewish origin but now also occupied by Muslims and Christians, seemed a logical place for a settlement.

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