Charles Allston Collins, 1828 - 1873

CHARLES ALLSTON COLLINS, 1828 - 1873 INTRODUCTION In studies of Pre-Raphaelitism Collins has sometimes been overlooked or dismissed as an imitator of Millais, but if we look closely at his life and what little survives of his work, the struggles of this accomplished painter, his achievements and his complex personality become clearer. Dogged by lack of self-confidence and illness, he endured to become the best known of the Pre-Raphaelite painters after Millais, Hunt and Rossetti. Today, less than ten of his paintings survive, and the rediscovery of his important The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, from the early years of the Brotherhood, reveals a fascinating story. EARLY YEARS AND PRE-RAPHAELITISM Charles Allston Collins was born into the artistic elite of London, the son of the artist William Collins R.A., a landscape and genre painter, who was a pupil of Morland. At one point William was the Royal Academy’s Librarian, and for most of his career was closely involved in Academy affairs. He was described by Linnell’s biographer: ‘The worthy Academician, though an amiable, was in many respects rather a weak-minded, man. He appeared always to be oppressed by the twin bugbears propriety and respectability, and found it difficult to forgive anyone who failed in his respect to them.’ i This fault made him blind to humanity on occasion. William Blake’s biographer recounted: ‘As there was no servant, he [Blake] fetched the porter for dinner himself, from the house at the corner of the Strand. Once, pot of porter in hand, he espied coming along a dignitary of art—that highly respectable man, William Collins, R.A., whom he had met in society a few evenings before. The Academician was about to shake hands, but seeing the porter, drew up, and did not know him.’ ii Charles’ mother Harriet, née Geddes, was the sister of Margaret Carpenter the portrait painter, and was a very different character from her husband; she had wanted to be an actress, but became a teacher, and educated both her sons at home. Charles Allston Collins was named after his godfather Washington Allston the American history painter, and his older brother William Wilkie Collins was named after his godfather, Sir David Wilkie. Their parents expected great things of them; Wilkie was destined for the Church (but of course rebelled, to become the famous novelist), and it seemed pre-ordained that Charles should be a painter; he joined the Royal Academy schools in 1843. William Holman Hunt, who joined the R.A. schools in 1844 (after three attempts), recalled meeting him for the first time: ‘He was then a remarkable looking boy with statuesquely formed features, of aquiline type, and strong blue eyes. The characteristic that marked him out was his brilliant bushy red hair, which was not of golden splendour, but had an attractive beauty in it.’ iii Wilkie Collins, with the withering scorn of an older brother, wrote to their mother in 1845 that Charles seemed ‘to have more chance of becoming a member of the Royal Academy of Dancing at Paris, than of the Royal Academy of Arts at London’, iv but Charles had early success with two portraits accepted to the Academy Exhibition at the young age of 19 in 1847. Figure 2. Charles Allston Collins, The Graphic, 3 May 1873, p 413. In character, Charles was abstemious and sensitive. Like his father, he was devout, favouring ‘the Puseyite form of faith.’ v At the R.A. schools he made friends with John Everett Millais, who, although younger by nearly one and a half years, had been admitted as a student three years earlier (the youngest ever at the age of eleven), and was fêted as a child prodigy. The two were well suited, but if Collins’s family connections impressed the ambitious Millais (Collins was the only member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle whose father was a Royal Academician, and the lions of the Royal Academy - Wilkie, Turner, Stothard, Constable and Etty - were frequent visitors to their house), Millais was the dominant personality, for he was irresistibly charming and good-looking (‘everyone, men, women, and children, particularly children, loved Millais’, wrote Mrs. E.M. Ward vi). Millais became a frequent visitor to the Collins household in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park (fifteen minutes from Millais’s house in Gower Street), where, especially after the death of William Collins in 1847, Harriet Collins provided a warm and hospitable welcome, enjoying flirtatious banter with her sons’ friends. Millais became her son no. 3, and Hunt became her ‘son no. 4’. vii 1 Figure 3. Charles Allston Collins, Berengaria’s Alarm for the Safety of her Husband, Richard Coeur de Lion, Awakened by the Sight of his Girdle Offered for Sale at Rome, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 42 in, © Manchester Art Gallery 2 Collins showed conventional paintings at the Royal Academy for three years before he converted suddenly to Pre-Raphaelitism with his Berengaria’s Alarm for the Safety of her Husband, Richard Coeur de Lion, Awakened by the Sight of his Girdle Offered for Sale at Rome at the Academy in 1850 (Fig. 3). Hunt explained: 'Collins had sent in his year’s labour in a picture of “Berengaria seeing the Girdle of Richard offered for Sale in Rome.” Under the influence of Millais he had in this work discarded his early manner, and striven to carry out our principles.’ viii Collins had started working on this ambitious 40” x 50” canvas in about May 1849. The subject is from Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England, which Millais was mining at the time for his highly finished drawing of The Disentombment of Queen Matilda (Fig. 4). Berengaria’s Alarm…, painted in pale transparent tints, recalls the complex symbolism of Rossetti’s colour scheme in his The Girlhood of the Mary Virgin (Tate Britain) of 1849, whilst the technique and composition is similar to other early Pre-Raphaelite pictures. By 1850, Millais, who could work quickly, had already moved on and he exhibited two major new paintings alongside Berengaria’s Alarm…. One was his first of an outdoor subject, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (Private Collection). Painted in extraordinary botanical detail, it follows Ruskin’s advice to young artists given in Volume I of Modern Painters (published in 1843) to go to nature ‘rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’. Collins did not exhibit his first outdoor subject, Convent Thoughts, until a year later in 1851 (Fig. 5). This pattern, of fresh ideas sparking amongst the Pre-Raphaelites and immediately detonating in fresh paintings by Millais but smouldering over months and more in Collins before any results appeared, was to repeat itself several times over the next five years. Millais even beat Collins to painting the portrait of his own brother, Wilkie, by three years. ix Millais’s other painting at the Academy of 1850 was Christ in the House of His Parents (Tate Britain). The Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Academy, and this one in particular, provoked a storm of criticism – Charles Dickens described Mary: '...so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France or in the lowest gin-shop in England.’ x However, it was not so much the brilliant colours and extraordinary detail of the Pre-Raphaelites, which were ugly and disturbing enough to the public, but their religious subjects that truly shocked. xi The subject and treatment of Christ… was suggested to Millais by a sermon he had heard given by E.B. Pusey, the Oxford Movement Theologian, and the painting reads like a Catholic homily. Relations between Protestants and Catholics, uneasy since the Reformation, were particularly tense in 1850 after Pope Pius IX re- established the Catholic hierarchy in England under the imperious Cardinal Wiseman, in the newly invented role of ‘Archbishop of Westminster’. The Times commented: ‘The absurdity of the selection of this title for this illegitimate prelate is equal to its arrogance. Everybody knows that Westminster never was in early Christian times a Bishop's see, but a monastery ...it is a term devoid of meaning; but its meaning lies, we fear, in an unambiguous intention to insult the Church and the Crown of England…’ xii The new Archbishop inflamed matters with the regal tone of his first pastoral letter in the Times a fortnight later: ‘Catholic England has been Figure 4. Sir John Everett Millais, The Disentombment of Queen Matilda, 1849, ink on paper, 9 x 17 in, © Tate restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had 3 Figure 6. William Holman Hunt, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 43 3/4 x 55 1/2 in, © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 4 long vanished’, he wrote. ‘We govern and shall continue to govern… [the Home Counties] …as administrator, with ordinary jurisdiction.’ xiii This ‘Papal Aggression’, as it was seen, xiv provoked an immediate English reaction: savage, unreasoning and widespread hostility directed against all ‘Papists’, and there were several violent ‘No Popery’ riots that winter. Alongside the external threat of Rome, there were also problems within the Anglican Church, where a few High Church clergymen in Oxford wanted to revive Catholic liturgy and ritual in Anglican services, to the great suspicion of the wider community of Low Church Anglicans. Some High Church ideas, published in pamphlets that earned their authors the nickname of ‘Tractarians’, were attractive to the Pre-Raphaelites not only because several of the Brothers worshipped in High churches, but also because they were interested in the revival of things Medieval.

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