Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1885 Wanganui, New Zealand

Died: 1964 Wanganui, New Zealand

Year of Migration to the UK: 1912

Biography

Painter Edith Marion Collier was born in Wanganui, New Zealand, in 1885. Her father was intensely musical and encouraged this interest in his children who formed a quartet in which Edith played the cello. From 1903 onwards, she studied art at the Wanganui Technical School; encouraged by the painter Herbert Babbage to seek further training overseas, Collier left New Zealand in 1912 to continue her studies in England.

In London Collier found lodgings with other young female students at Queen Alexandra's House and enrolled in classes at St. John's Wood School of Art, although she rejected its conventional programme and conservative approach, as an émigrée painter her choice of teachers was limited and she found it difficult to break into established artistic networks. Her most significant teacher was fellow Australian émigrée Margaret Preston, a painter then teaching in London, who also provided Collier with personal encouragement and support. In 1914 Collier travelled to Bonmahon in Southern Ireland to attend one of Preston's summer art classes, and later returned for a further seven-month stay in 1915. Her portrait studies of local peasants, as well as paintings, prints and sketches of their dwellings and the dramatic scenery at Bonmahon are among her finest works. Under Preston's influence Collier lightened her palette, simplified her forms and composition, and flattened her picture space. Preston's school was disbanded in the autumn of 1915, when wartime restrictions were placed on sketching along the coastline, and Collier returned to London, settling in her new attic rooms at 5 Leinster Square. During the First World War, she housed soldiers on leave, organised mail and money, and sent regular parcels of food and clothing to the Front. She celebrated women's contributions to the war effort in Ministry of Labour: The Recruiting Office for Women (c. 1916–17, Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, New Zealand), a dynamic composition portraying a group of women waiting to offer their labour for war-related tasks and employment. The flattening of space, especially in the background, and the decorative, frieze-like placing of the figures suggests her increasing familiarity with modernist conventions. She then returned to St. John's Wood Art School and received further private tuition from Preston, with whom she moved the following year to Bibury, a 14-century hamlet in the Cotswolds; in 1917, they both exhibited at the Society of Women Artists' and Collier received her first critical review. Encouraged by her success, Collier decided to pursue her earlier interest in the female nude, writing to her parents with some excitement: '... next week till Xmas I want to have a figure model. I haven't had a [chance] on that yet. I won't be able to get figures in Wanganui'. She hired a model to pose at her Leinster Square attic studio and produced numerous sketches, pastel drawings and paintings of the female nude including the sinewy The Lady of Kent (c. 1918), which knowingly challenged conventional notions of female beauty. Her first exhibition as part of the 1918 Society of Women Artists' show received a favourable review in The Times. Following Preston's return to Australia in 1919, Collier joined Frances Hodgkins's school in the artists' colony at St. Ives, Cornwall in 1920 and produced her most experimental work to date. Her three-month stay resulted in a considerable body of watercolours and oil paintings, as well as pencil and charcoal sketches of the local area.

In 1921 she returned to New Zealand to find a hostile artistic environment in which modernism was regarded as an aberration. Savage criticism of her paintings, negative responses from her own community and the burning of the majority of her paintings of the female nude by her father left Collier demoralised and she laid her brushes aside for almost five years, turning her energy to domestic concerns. She exhibited sporadically, producing both landscapes and portraits, but without the innovative edge of her St. Ives period. Deprived of the support of an artistic community and the intellectual and cultural stimulus she had enjoyed in Britain, Collier faded into obscurity. She died in Wanganui, New Zealand in 1964.

Related books

Lynley Ward, 'The Artist New Zealand Forgot: Remembering Edith Collier', New Zealand Woman's Weekly, October 2018
David Tovey, Sea Change: Fine and Decorative Art in St Ives 1914–1930 (Tewkesbury: Wilson Books, 2010)
Joanne Drayton, 'Lifelines: the Intimate Correspondence of New Zealand's Most Remarkable Women Travellers (Ngaio Marsh, Frances Hodgkins, Edith Collier, and Rhona Haszard)', Archifacts, October 2009-April 2010, pp. 65-76
Joanne Drayton, 'Edith Collier: An Early New Zealand Modernist', Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring-Summer 1997, pp. 9-13
Joanne Drayton, 'Edith Collier: Profile of a New Zealand Expatriate (1885–1964)', Women’s Art Magazine, June-July 1996
Joanne Drayton, 'Edith Collier: a Personal Journey Towards Modernism', Art New Zealand, No. 76, Spring 1995
Joanne Drayton, Edith Collier (Christchurch: Canterbury UP, 1999)
Joanne Drayton, 'Frances Hodgkins and Edith Collier: A Teacher and Student', Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, No. 4 , 1980
Elizabeth Plumridge, The Thwarted Career of Artist Edith Collier (Palmerson: Comment, 1980)

Public collections

Related organisations

Wanganui Technical School (student)
St. John's Wood Art School (student)

Selected exhibitions

Empire Artists' Exhibition (1937)
Women's International Art Club (1917, 1918)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edith Collier]