Charles Collins c.1694/1704-1744
A Still-life with of Dead Game, Bittern, Snipe, and Partridge, with a Spaniel and a Gun
Oil on canvas, 84 x 107 cm.
Signed and dated 1730
Biographical evidence is scarce for Charles Collins, which is disappointing as he is of immense interest as a rare and highly talented, Irish still-life painter known for his ‘meticulously detailed’ works (AAI, Vol. 2, 212). Indeed, Collins is one of the most significant Irish artists to have emerged since the publication of Crookshank and Glin’s groundbreaking work, The Painters of Ireland. Although mentioned by Strickland as working in Ireland, he had fallen into obscurity and, by 1981, when his striking Still Life with a Lobster on a Delft Dish was purchased by the Tate Gallery in London, the little that was known of his life was confused. Collins has since been reclaimed for the Irish school and is acknowledged as one of the most accomplished artists to have worked here in the early and middle years of the eighteenth century.
Collins is specifically referred to as an ‘Irish Master’ in the Dublin Evening Post for 4 May 1786 in connection with the sale of the collection of the doctor, and property developer, Gustavus Hume in which a game still-life was favourably noted: ‘a dead hare, dead birds etc...allowed by the first judges in point of elegance and performance, to be inferior to none’. Seemingly this formed a pendant to another work by the artist showing life fowl. A further still-life was included in the collection of James Digges La Touche that was auctioned in Geminiani’s rooms in Dublin in May 1764, while the Kildares of Carton also owned an example of his art.
Collins worked in both oil and watercolour and seems to have been almost exclusively a painter of still-life. Vertue referred to him as a ‘bird painter’, although also noting a self-portrait, while Horace Walpole described him as a painter of ‘all sorts of fowl and game’. Certainly, game predominates in Collins’s oeuvre, as is evident in the present very accomplished work dating from 1730 and a related still-life in the National Gallery of Ireland from the same year. These are among the earliest surviving works by Collins, perhaps suggesting that the later date given for his birth of 1704 is correct. Both this and the NGI picture are very much in the Dutch tradition of seventeenth-century artists such as Jan Weenix, Franz Snyders and Jan Fyt and it has been suggested by Nicola Figgis that Collins may have pursued a period of training in the Low Countries (AAI, Vol. 2, 212). Instead, however, of being stylistically retardataire, here he is working in a manner comparable to his most advanced French contemporaries such as Alexandre-François Desportes and Jean-Baptise Oudry. One comment in a sale catalogue of March 1782 shows the esteem in which he was held – ‘equal to Hondikooter’ [sic] – and within the wider field of British and Irish art, Collins has been lauded, despite the lowly ranking of the genre in which he worked, as being among those artists whose ‘feeling for paint and colour...heralded Reynolds’.
Six years after he painted this game still-life Collins embarked on what is perhaps his most famous work, a series of twelve oil paintings of birds in naturalistic settings. Nine of these are now owned by the National Trust at Anglsey Abbey, while three are in an Irish private collection. Also in 1736, Collins, together with Peter Paillou, embarked on a series of watercolours of British birds and mammals for the collector Taylor White. These sheets have long been admired and many of them are now in collection of McGill University, Montreal.
Collins is perhaps the only Irish artist of the period to consistently explore the genre of still-life in oil. It is noteworthy how William Ashford, for example, quickly abandoned still-life for landscape after painting a few, rather naïve, flower pieces early in his career. There was, however, a market for the genre, though not comparable in scale to that for portraiture or landscape, and many still-lives were exhibited at the Society of Artists in Dublin, though often by amateurs. At the same time, still-life flourished in media other than oil, most notably in the art of Samuel Dixon and his Capel Street apprentices such as Daniel O’Keeffe, James Reilly and Gustavus Hamilton. The one other eighteenth-century artist in oil who worked in a manner close to Collins in Dublin was the slightly later Charles Lewis.