Thomas Collier (painter)
British artist (1840-1891)
Thomas Collier RI (12 November 1840 – 14 May 1891) was an English landscape painter, mainly in watercolour. Although not a prolific worker or exhibitor, he is regarded as one of the finest English landscape watercolourists.
Collier was industrious, retiring and often in poor health, yet financially independent, able to work without pandering to popular taste and to travel at will into the Suffolk countryside.
Biography
Collier was born in Glossop in Derbyshire, the son of Martha Siddall and Thomas Collier, who was a prosperous grocer and tea dealer. He received tuition at the Manchester School of Art and, inspired by David Cox's example, lived at Betws-y-Coed in northern Wales between 1864 and 1869. He moved to London in about 1870 after being elected to the New Water Colour Society, as it was then called.
In the 1870s he became a close friend of Edmund Morison Wimperis, who was actually a few years older, but then less experienced in watercolour. The two often toured together, painting side by side, and Wimperis was greatly influenced by him, in stylistic and technical matters. Somewhat later he formed a similar friendship with, and had a similar influence on, the younger Claude Hayes.
Collier was also a close friend of Charles Stuart Millard, the Canadian-born painter (who moved to England before 1879 and was employed as an instructor at the South Kensington Art School, before taking up an appointment as Headmaster at the Cheltenham School of Art).
“Thomas Collier (painter)” enters the record as british artist (1840-1891). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thomas, Collier and painter can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7788541. VIAF identifies the subject as 34379557. The Library of Congress control number is nr99032568. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1840, 1891, 1864 and 1869.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Collier (painter)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.