Above: Guinevere by John Collier (1900) Bradford Museums and Galleries, Bradford, U.K.

Leading English artist John Maler Collier  was born on 27 January 1850.  He was a painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style; and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. In April 1875, at the age of 25, Collier enrolled at the Munich Academy where he studied painting.

• Both his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley.
• Collier married his first wife Marian (Mady) Huxley, in 1879. She was an artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. After the birth of their only child, a daughter, Joyce; Mady suffered severe post-natal depression and was taken to Paris for treatment where, she contracted pneumonia and died in 1887.
• In 1889 Collier married Mady’s younger sister Ethel Huxley in Norway.
• By his second wife he had a daughter and a son, Sir Laurence Collier, who was the British Ambassador to Norway from 1941–1951.
• Collier’s daughter Joyce, was a portrait miniaturist and became a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters.

  John Collier died on 11 April, 1934.

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