English landscape 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, largeness of 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.)