Charles Allston Collins
Charles Allston Collins (London 25 January 1828 – 9 April 1873) was a British painter, writer, and illustrator associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Life and work
Early years
Collins was born in Hampstead, north London, the son of landscape and genre painter William Collins. His older brother was the novelist Wilkie Collins. He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.
Painting career
Collins met John Everett Millais and became influenced by the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites, completing his painting Berengaria's Alarm in 1850. This depicted the wife of King Richard the Lionheart noticing her missing husband's girdle offered for sale by a peddlar. The flattened modelling, emphasis on pattern making, and imagery of embroidery were all characteristic features of Pre-Raphaelitism. Millais proposed that Collins should become a member of the Brotherhood, but Thomas Woolner and William Michael Rossetti objected, so he never became an official member.
Collins fell in love with Maria Francesca Rossetti, but she rejected him. He became increasingly ascetic and introspective. These attitudes were expressed in Collins's best-known work, Convent Thoughts, which depicted a nun in a convent garden. Collins went on to exhibit many highly devotional images.
Literary career
In the late 1850s, however, he abandoned art to follow his brother into a writing career. His most successful literary works were humorous essays collected together under the title The Eye Witness (1860).
Later life
Collins married Charles Dickens's daughter Kate in 1860, and later was engaged to illustrate Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He completed the cover but was too ill to do the rest. He died from cancer in 1873 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.[1]
See also
Further reading
- Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1887). "Collins, Charles Allston" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 366.
References
- ^ Lucinda Hawksley, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter, New York, Doubleday, 2006.
External links
- C A Collins online (ArtCyclopedia)
- C A Collins biography ("Wilkie Collins' Family")
- Charles Allston Collins at Find a Grave
- 10 artworks by or after Charles Allston Collins at the Art UK site
- v
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artists and
figures
- Lawrence Alma-Tadema
- George Price Boyce
- John Brett
- Ford Madox Brown
- Lucy Madox Brown
- Richard Burchett
- Edward Burne-Jones
- Georgiana Burne-Jones
- James Campbell
- John Collier
- Charles Allston Collins
- Frank Cadogan Cowper
- Evelyn De Morgan
- Walter Deverell
- Henry Treffry Dunn
- William Dyce
- Henry Holiday
- Arthur Hughes
- Edward Robert Hughes
- Frederic Leighton
- Robert Braithwaite Martineau
- Louisa Beresford, Marchioness of Waterford
- William Morris
- Alexander Munro
- Joseph Noel Paton
- Valentine Cameron Prinsep
- Christina Rossetti
- John Ruskin
- Emma Sandys
- Frederick Sandys
- Thomas Seddon
- Elizabeth Siddal
- James Smetham
- Rebecca Solomon
- Simeon Solomon
- John Roddam Spencer Stanhope
- Marie Spartali Stillman
- John Melhuish Strudwick
- Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Henry Wallis
- John William Waterhouse
- William James Webbe
- William Lindsay Windus
well-known
works
(period and
post-period)
- Ophelia
- Christ in the House of His Parents
- A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids
- Ecce Ancilla Domini
- Mariana
- The Light of the World
- Our English Coasts ('Strayed Sheep')
- The Scapegoat
- Paolo and Francesca da Rimini
- The Last of England
- Work
- The Awakening Conscience
- The Hireling Shepherd
- April Love
- Found
- Autumn Leaves
- Bocca Baciata
- Oxford Union murals
- Lady Lilith
- Roman Widow
- Mary Magdalene
- The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple
- Morgan le Fay
- Beata Beatrix
- The Shadow of Death
- Proserpine
- A Vision of Fiammetta
- Pygmalion and the Image series
- The Beloved
- Cymon and Iphigenia
- King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
- The Day Dream
- The Golden Stairs
- Dante and Beatrice
- Love's Messenger
- The Magic Circle
- The Legend of Briar Rose
- The Lady of Shalott (Waterhouse)
- The Roses of Heliogabalus
- Lilith
- Eos
- Flaming June
- Hope
- Hylas and the Nymphs
- Lady Godiva
- The Love Potion
- The Lady of Shalott (Hunt)
- I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott
- The Germ
- Hogarth Club
- Morris & Co.
- Rossetti and His Circle (1922 book)
- Dante's Inferno (1967 film)
- The Love School (1975 series)
- Desperate Romantics (2009 series)
- Effie Gray (2014 film)