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sabato 11 giugno 2016

John Collier (painter)

John Collier

John Maler Collier (Londra, 27 gennaio 1850 – Londra, 11 aprile 1934) è stato uno scrittore e pittore britannico, membro della Confraternita dei Preraffaelliti.
Fu uno dei principali pittori della sua generazione.

Biografia

Collier nacque da una famiglia di successo. Suo nonno, John Collier, fu un commerciante che divenne membro del Parlamento. Suo padre (che era un Procuratore generale e, per molti anni, a tempo pieno giudice del Privy Council) è stato il primo Signore Monkswell e anche membro della Royal Society of British Artists. Il fratello maggiore di John Collier, il secondo Signore di Monkswell è stato Sottosegretario di Stato per la guerra e presidente della London County Council.
A tempo debito, Collier è diventato parte integrante della famiglia di Thomas Henry Huxley, presidente della Royal Society. Collier sposò due figlie di Huxley. La prima moglie fu Marian più nota come Mady; una celebre pittrice, che studiò, come suo marito, presso la Slade ed espose alla Royal Academy e altrove molte sue opere. La coppia ebbe una figlia, Joyce, anche lei espressa nel ramo della pittura; tuttavia per gravi danni in seguito al parto la madre fu portata a Parigi dove morì di polmonite nel 1887. Poco tempo dopo, nel 1889, Collier sposò la sorella minore Ethel Huxley. Con la sua seconda moglie ebbe sia una figlia che un figlio: sir Laurence Collier, ambasciatore britannico in Norvegia, 1939-1950.
Collier ha dipinto numerosi ritratti di membri della famiglia. Ha dipinto sia le sue mogli, che Marion ed Ethel (figlie di Thomas Henry), la sua seconda figlia, e la moglie di Huxley, Aldous Huxley e il giovane Gervas Huxley. Ci sono poi altri ritratti di scienziati, tra cui Charles Darwin (due volte), William Kingdon Clifford, James Prescott Joule e Michael Foster.
La collezione dei dipinti di Collier esposti alla National Portrait Gallery (Londra) è scarna, ma nel 2007 venne acquistato il ritratto della sua prima moglie dipinto da lui.

Pensiero

Le opinioni di Collier sulla religione e sull'etica sono interessanti per il confronto con quelle di Thomas e Julian Huxley. In La religione di un artista (1926) Collier spiega:
« [Il libro] riguarda soprattutto l'etica separatamente dalla religione. […] Io attendo con impazienza il momento in cui l'etica avrà preso il posto della religione. […] La mia religione è veramente negativa. [I benefici della religione] possono essere ottenuti con altri mezzi meno tendenti al conflitto e che impongono uno sforzo minore alle facoltà di ragionamento. »
Per quanto concerne l'idea di Dio:
« La gente potrebbe affermare senza esagerazione che la credenza in Dio è universale. Omettono di aggiungere che la superstizione, spesso del tipo più degradato, è altrettanto universale. […] Una Divinità onnipotente che condanni anche la più vile delle sue creature alla tortura eterna è infinitamente più crudele dell'uomo più crudele. »
E sulla Chiesa:
« Per me, come per la maggior parte degli inglesi, il trionfo del Cattolicesimo Romano significherebbe un disastro indicibile per la causa della civiltà. »
Il suo punto di vista, quindi, si avvicina molto a quello dell'agnosticismo di T.H. Huxley e all'umanesimo di Julian Huxley.

 Tannhäuser in the Venusberg (1901), olio di John Collier

The Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI (27 January 1850 – 11 April 1934) 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.

Family


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, 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 (Mady) 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.

Subjects

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 Duke of York (later George V) as Master of Trinity House in 1901, and the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) 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 artist's 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 Collier's Sitters Book (made in 1962 from the original in the possession of the artist's son) 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.

Posthumous reputation

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".

Public collections

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 (the artist's father in law) and Charles Darwin (copies of the last two are also prominently displayed at the top of the staircase at the Athenaeum Club in London).
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.
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 full-length portrait of Sir Charles Tertius Mander, first baronet, is at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire, with another version in the collection of the National Trust at Wightwick Manor.
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 (catalogue, p27).

Views on ethics and religion

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".

John Collier by his first wife Marian, née Huxley ~1882
Marion Collier (née Huxley) (1859-1887) - National Portrait Gallery

Pharaoh's Handmaidens (1883)

Lilith with a Snake (1886)
 Lady Godiva ~1898, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
 John Collier

The Land Baby (1899)

Eve (1911)


Pomps and Vanities
                                          John Maler Collier  
(1917)
The Water Nymph (1923) 

The Spring Wood
John Collier · unknown


Last Voyage Of Henry Hudson, 1881 

Clytemnestra, 1882

The Priestess of Bacchus , 1885-1889

Horace and Lydia (1890)

Priestess of Delphi, 1891

 The Laboratory (1895)

  Queen Guinevre's Maying, 1900

A Glass of Wine with Caesar Borgia, b. 1914

 The sleeping beauty, oil on canvas, 91 x 112 cm, 1921

 


 


 


 



 

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