THOMAS COLLIER
Englishlandscape art—the practice of which he had adorned by five-and-twenty years of noble work—sustains a profound loss in the death of Thomas Collier. He was born in the year 1840, at Glossop, on the Derbyshire border. He early addressed himself to the career of a landscape painter; and it is true, no doubt, that his method was founded upon that of David Cox, nor is it possible that he could have set up for himself a better model of delicacy of observation, and of decisive and economical handwork. And the medium of Collier was—like that of David Cox—almost exclusively water-colour. His oil paintings were few, and, like Cox’s, they were executed chiefly in his later time. But, with him, the later time was still only middle age. Collier died when he was fifty-one: David Cox at seventy-six. Had David Cox left us at the age of Collier, he would hardly have been remembered to-day, and could have been an example to no one. Collier passed through no such prolonged period of preparation for mastery. He was already a master in his early manhood. His work cannot well be divided into periods: freedom of manner, largenessof vision and touch, belonged to him almost from the first. To the quite superficial observer of his drawings, it appeared that he painted only two or three subjects, and these on the same grey day. But to the real student of his work, the richness and variety of his resource is revealed. He observed and recorded differences of weather and light which escape all casual and all untrained notice; and if he was among the simplest and most vigorous, he was also among the most poetic recorders of English countryside and homestead—of farm, and coast, and moor. His work, exhibited in France, obtained for him the decoration of a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and here in England he was one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. But it is doubtful whether the opportunities afforded to the large public for seeing his work were frequent enough to secure him that degree of actual popularity which was his due; and it is at all events certain that when the cabinet of sketches which he showed occasionally to his friends shall come to be known more widely, Collier will be accorded, without cavil or questioning, a lasting place among the Masters.
(Academy, 23rd May 1891.)