John Collier was born into an upper-class family and attended Eton College. At an early age, he met the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who encouraged him to study art. Collier studied first in London, then in Paris and Munich. From 1891, he was a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. His portraits are characterised by strict composition. Among others, he painted portraits of Charles Darwin (1882) and George Bernard Shaw (1927). Collier also painted histories, influenced by Alma-Tadema and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as landscapes. In the 1880s and 1890s, he also worked as an illustrator, for books by Thomas Hardy and William Makepeace Thackeray and others.