1850 -1934 · London, Slade, Munich, Paris and Royal Academy

Direct portraits, ambiguous stories and monumental heroines make John Collier a Victorian master of the” figure and “problem picture.

John Collier was born in London in 1850 into an influential family; his father would become Lord Monkswell. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, in Munich then in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens. From 1874, he exhibited at the Royal Academy and built a sixty-year career. Collier became one of the most sought-after portrait painters of his time, representing scientists, politicians, writers and families with clear light and direct resemblance. His connection with the Huxley family introduced him to the heart of Victorian intellectual debates: he first married Marian Huxley, also an artist, and then after his death his sister Ethel. Next to portraits, Collier painted subjects historical, mythological and literary conceived as immediately readable but morally open scenes. Lady Godiva places the naked figure in the center of an empty city, combining legend, vulnerability and civic courage. Armide's Garden transforms the story of the Cup into a sensual space. Sacred and secular love and Pompes et vanities belong to the world of “problem pictures”, images whose conflict or meaning the viewer must reconstruct. Collier defends a truth attentive to nature and exposes his method in A Manual of Oil Painting then The Art of Portrait Painting. Its smooth surface, its bold colors and its precise design remain figurative at the moment when art european changes radically. Died in London in 1934, he left a vast portrait of British society between science, empire, literature and moral theater. The "John Collier" selection notably compares Lady Godiva and Le Jardin d’Armide. His reading favors drawing.

Collier makes the story as clear as a portrait and the portrait as ambiguous as a story: the viewer sees everything, except the answer that he himself must construct.