Collier's life

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.

John Collier

A Devonshire Orchard

About Bouguereau

Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose realistic genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects-both pagan and Christian-with a heavy concentration on the female human body. Although he created an idealized world, his almost photo-realistic style brought to life his goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses, and madonnas in a way which was very appealing to rich art patrons of his time.

Bouguereau employed traditional methods of working up a painting, including detailed pencil studies and oil sketches, and his careful method resulted in a pleasing and accurate rendering of the human form. His painting of skin, hands, and feet was particularly admired. 

Bouguereau steadily gained the honors of the Academy, reaching Life Member in 1876, and Commander of the Legion of Honor and Grand Medal of Honor in 1885. He began to teach drawing at the Academie Julian in 1875, a co-ed art institution independent of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with no entrance exams and with nominal fees.

He used his influence to open many French art institutions to women for the first time, including the Academie francaise.

Near the end of his life he described his love of his art, "Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come. If I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable". He painted eight hundred and twenty-six paintings.Bouguereau died in La Rochelle at age 80 from heart disease

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

L'oiseau Chéri (Dear bird)

Arthur Hughes' life

Arthur Hughes was born in London on 27 January 1832, to Edward and Amy Hughes. He entered Archbishop Tenison's Grammar School in about 1838, and while there displayed an early talent for drawing; in 1846 he entered the School of Design, Somerset House where he studied under Alfred Stevens. In 1847 he enrolled in the Antique Schools at the Royal Academy, winning a silver medal in 1849 for a drawing from the Antique, and in that same year exhibited his first finished painting, "Musidora," at the Royal Academy. 1850 was the most important year of his life: he first discovered Pre-Raphaelitism by reading the "Germ"; he met Tryphena Foord, his future wife and mother of his six children; and met Alexander Munro, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown, thenceforward being converted to their cause. In 1856 Hughes exhibited two of his best paintings at the Royal Academy, "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "April Love," the latter being bought from the R.A. by William Morris. In 1857 he joined with Rossetti, Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and others in painting murals on the walls of the Oxford Union Debating Hall, an effort which perhaps inspired his later Arthurian works such as "The Knight of the Sun" and "Sir Galahad." Another well-known painting is "Home from Sea", begun at Chingford, Essex in 1856, but not completed until 1862-63 when the figure of the girl was added. As well as being the best of the younger Pre-Raphaelite followers, Hughes was one of the leading book illustrators of the period, producing drawings for Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," Thomas Hughes's (no relation) "Tom Brown's School Days," and George MacDonald's "At the Back of the North Wind" and "The Princess and the Goblin." Hughes's only official post was Art Examiner in the South Kensington Schools, although he taught from January to August 1877 at the Working Men's College. In 1912 he was awarded a Civil List Pension, and on 23 December 1915 he died in Kew Green, London, having produced approximately 700 known paintings & drawings and 750 book illustrations during his lifetime. For more information, and a comprehensive catalogue of his works, see "Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works, A Catalogue Raisonné by Leonard Roberts, with a Biographical Introduction by Stephen Wildman" (Woodbridge: ACC Ltd., 1997).

Arthur Hughes

Ophelia

John William Waterhouse

The missal.