William Collins (painter)

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William Collins
RA
Portrait of William Collins (1831) by John Linnell
Born(1788-09-08)8 September 1788
London, England
Died17 February 1847(1847-02-17) (aged 58)
London, United Kingdom
NationalityEnglish

William Collins

genre painter.[1] His sentimental paintings of poor people enjoying nature became a posthumous high fashion, notably in the 1870s when his market price rose higher than Constable (Cromer Sands, £3780, 1872) and stayed so until 1894. Turner, his model, far exceeded him in value (The Grand Canal, Venice, sold to Vanderbilt in 1885 for £20,000).[2]

Life and work

Rustic Civility (1833)
Embodying features of tonalism long before the movement's rise in popularity, Children on the Beach, was painted c. 1815–1820 and is housed at the Clark Art Institute
Barmouth Sands by William Collins, 1835, Guildhall Gallery, London

Collins was born in

Royal Academy (at the same time as William Etty), and exhibited at the Academy for the first time in the same year.[1] In 1809 he was awarded a medal in the life school, and exhibited three pictures\: Boy at Breakfast, Boys with a Bird's-nest and a Portrait of Master Lee as he spoke the Prologue at the Haymarket Theatre.[1]

In 1811, Collins sold a picture entitled The Young Fifer to the Marquis of Stafford for 80

Lord Liverpool.[1] In 1814 two pictures, The Blackberry Gatherers and The Birdcatchers (both sold privately) won him an associateship of the Royal Academy (ARA).[1]

In 1815, Collins undertook a sketching tour of the coast near

Prince Regent.[1][5] In 1817 he visited Paris with Leslie and Washington Allston and painted The Departure of the Diligence from Rouen, and the Scene on the Boulevards (both sold privately) – these were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818. He also painted several portraits about this time.[1]

In 1820, Collins was elected a Royal Academician (RA), presenting as his diploma picture The Young Anglers. In 1822 he married Harriet Geddes, sister of the portrait painter

Boulogne in 1836. Rustic Hospitality was painted in 1834 and in 1836 Sunday Morning and As Happy as a King, the subject of the latter being suggested to Collins by the story of a country boy whose ideal of regal happiness was swinging on a gate all day and eating fat bacon.[1] Collins painted several works with children as the primary focus, including Children on a Mountain Top (1846), with his earliest examples featuring a color pallet closer to tonalism
decades before the movement's rise to popularity in the 1880s.

Scene from the Caves of Ulysses, at Sorrento (1841)

In September 1836, Collins left London for Italy, where he remained for two years, occupying himself with advancing his knowledge of painting, but he had to return due to illness. He then began a series of pictures depicting Italian life, including Poor Travellers at the door of a Capuchin Convent near Vico, Bay of Naples[6] and A Scene near Subiaco, both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. They were followed in 1840–1841 by two New Testament subjects: Our Saviour with the Doctors in the Temple, and The Two Disciples at Emmaus.[1]

From 1840 to 1842 Collins was librarian to the Royal Academy and in 1843 moved to a large house at 1 Devonport Street, Hyde Park Gardens. In 1840 he visited

Shetland Islands, the latter inspiring a series of illustrations for Sir Walter Scott's novel Pirate, which appeared in the "Waverley" edition of the book.[1]

In 1846 Collins's Early Morning was exhibited.

watercolours such as The Rat-catcher, Landing Fish, A Street in Naples and Kentish Peasant Girls, and did several etchings, most of which were given to the British Museum by Mrs. Collins, along with engravings of his best works.[1]

Death

The grave of William Collins, St Marys Gardens, Paddington

Collins died of heart disease, "terminating in dropsy", in Devonport Street on 17 February 1847. He was buried in the cemetery of the church of St. Mary, Paddington, where a monument in the form of a cross was erected by his widow.[1] The grave now stands isolated, on the north side of St Marys Gardens, after the churchyard's conversion into a public park in 1881. It has been vandalised, and the marble cross is missing; the inscription is also eroding.

He left two sons, the elder being the novelist William

John Gibbons (1777–1851) at No. 16, and in 1856, when Collins's widow Harriet gave up No. 17, she moved next door to stay with Gibbons's widow, Elizabeth Steen.[7]

Works

Collins exhibited at the Royal Academy every year from 1807 to 1846 (a total of 124 pictures) and showed 45 pictures at the British Institution. His major works are listed in Volume 2 (pp. 341–352) of "Memoirs" (see Bibliography).

Today his works appear in the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain in London and at other regional centres.

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1887). "Collins, William (1788-1847)" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 380–81.
  2. ^ Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, London 1959, I.82, 277, 470)
  3. ^ His father, a native of Wicklow, Ireland, wrote a biography of George Morland, a poem on the slave trade, and other work.
  4. ^ Collins biog (www.wilkie-collins.info)
  5. ^ "Scene on the Coast of Norfolk". Royal Collection.
  6. ^ See "Poor Travellers". Liverpool Museums.
  7. ^ "William Collins RA". Retrieved 22 February 2021.

Bibliography

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to William Collins.
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