The Hon. John Collier

James Hill Esq., by 1914

Royal Academy Pictures, 1899, illus. p.72;
'The Royal Academy: Third Notice', in The Times, 23 May 1899, p.6
W. H. Pollock, The Art of The Hon. John Collier, special edition of The Art Annual, 1914, illus. colour plate opposite p. 13;
Pamela M. Fletcher, Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture 1895-1914, 2003, pp.48-50, illus. p.49

John Collier was born in London the son of a distinguished judge and lawyer who was raised to the peerage as Lord Monkswell. He was educated at Eton  and considered a career in diplomacy but chose to be an artist. He was introduced to Lawrence Alma-Tadema who took an interest in the young artist but refused to accept him as a pupil. John Everett Millais also encouraged Collier and his influence is noticeable in many of his pictures. Collier studied at the Slade School of Art under Edward Poynter and progressed to continental academies in Munich and Paris. With the support of men like Tadema, Poynter and Millais, Collier became a versatile artist who painted at least a thousand pictures during his lifetime and exhibited 160 paintings at the Royal Academy. He was a talented portrait painter and depicted many of the most significant people of his generation including Charles Darwin, Henry Irving, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Lord Kitchener. Although portraiture was lucrative it was Collier's large and dramatic narrative paintings that found him fame and wealth. He painted conventional Victorian subjects such as The Priestess of Delphi (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide) Maenads (Art Gallery of South London), The Death of Cleopatra (Oldham Art Gallery) and Godiva (Coventry City Art Gallery) but specialised in painting 'Problem Pictures'. Problem pictures were a late Victorian phenomena that became highly fashionable with visitors to the Royal Academy exhibitions as they posed ambiguous conundrums for them to attempt to solve. Rather than depicting well-known narratives these pictures presented the viewer with visual clues to discern the narrative and the likely outcome of the drama but the narratives were usually open-ended. They often became the subject of great debate and many newspaper columns were filled with differing opinions on the meanings of Frank Dicksee, William Quiller Orchardson or Frederick Yeames' paintings. Collier often set these dramas in modern dress and notable examples include The Prodigal Daughter, The Cheat, The Sentence of Death, Mariage de Convenance, A Fallen Idol and A Confession. Collier's earliest Problem Painting was Trouble of 1898 depicting a moment of ominous tension within a domestic interior.

The subject of one of Collier's earliest 'Problem Pictures' The Garden of Armida was based upon the epic Italian poem by Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata of 1581. Tasso told of a Christian warrior Rinaldo and a pagan sorceress named Armida who lives in an enchanted garden in Syria where she holds crusaders captive preventing them from following their noble quests. Collier modernised the subject by depicting a young gentleman in contemporary evening dress, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women carousing with glasses of wine at an al fresco banquet in the forest. He appears to be caught between temperance and the temptations of hedonism but is stoic in his resolve to resist the charms of the girls. The subject is similar to the temptation of St. Anthony, Venus and Tannhauser, Ulysses and Circe in which women were cast as seductresses aiming to corrupt a virtuous modern-day hero. The roses on the table suggest that the women's promises are amorous whilst the armlet in the shape of a serpent suggests sinister intent and connects the subject with that of Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden.

When The Garden of Armida was exhibited at the Royal Academy one critic wrote of the painting; 'Give Armida a Rinaldo in armour, and the story tells itself; but make him a good-looking, serious young man in modern evening dress, as Mr. Collier has done, and instantly we begin to inquire into the probabilities. What is this youth going to do with such an embarras des richesses as three [sic] very festive ladies? Still more, how are the three going to divide him among themselves?' ('The Royal Academy: Third Notice', in The Times, 23 May 1899, p.6)