William Collins (8 September 1788, London – 17 February 1847, London) was an English landscape and genre painter. His sentimental paintings of poor people enjoying nature became a posthumous high fashion, notably in the 1870s when his market price rose higher than Constable (Cromer Sands, £3780, 1872) and stayed so until 1894. Turner, his model, far exceeded him in value (The Grand Canal, Venice, sold to Vanderbilt in 1885 for £20,000).
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Life and work
Collins was born in Great Titchfield Street, London, son of William Collins Sr., an Irish-born picture-dealer and writer. He showed a great aptitude for art from an early age, and was for a while an informal pupil of George Morland. In 1807, he entered the schools of the Royal Academy (at the same time as William Etty), and exhibited at the Academy for the first time in the same year. In 1809 he was awarded a medal in the life school, and exhibited three pictures\: Boy at Breakfast, Boys with a Bird's-nest and a Portrait of Master Lee as he spoke the Prologue at the Haymarket Theatre.
In 1811, Collins sold a picture entitled The Young Fifer to the Marquis of Stafford for 80 guineas (£88), and the next year produced the work which made him famous, The Sale of the Pet Lamb, which was sold for 140 guineas (£154) and engraved by S. W. Reynolds. He now became the chief support of his family after the death of his father (in financial difficulty) and found some valuable patrons, especially Sir Thomas Freeman Heathcote, Sir John Leicester, Sir Robert Peel, Sir George Beaumont, and Lord Liverpool. In 1814 two pictures, The Blackberry Gatherers and The Birdcatchers (both sold privately) won him an associateship of the Royal Academy (ARA).