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.
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.
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. Collier's daughter by his first marriage, Joyce, was a
portrait miniaturist,
and a member of the Royal Society of Miniature
Painters. By his second wife he had a daughter
and a son, Sir Laurence Collier, who was the British Ambassador to Norway 1941-51.
