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Marian Collier, née Huxley (April 1859 – 19 November 1887, known as “Mady” to her family, was an English painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Group of English artists formed in 1848 to counter what they saw as the corrupting influence of the late-Renaissance painter Raphael..[1][2] She was born in London, the third child of seven born to the scientist Thomas Huxley and his wife Henrietta Anne Heathorn.[1][3]
Marian studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.[a]The Huxley’s put all three of their daughters through the Slade School of Fine Art.[3] Between 1880 and 1884 she exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Grosvenor Gallery, the Suffolk Street Gallery and elsewhere.[1][2] Marian used her preferred spelling of her first name as “Marion” when she signed her work.[1]
On 30 June 1879 Marian married the writer and portrait painter John Collier, a fellow Slade graduate.[4] Considered to be “highly strung”, Marian suffered some kind of mental collapse, possibly acute postpartum depression, following the birth of their daughter Joyce in 1884. In 1887 she was examined by the celebrated French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who arranged for her to be treated in Paris, where she died from pneumonia on 19 November.[1][3][5]
Two years after Marian’s death, Collier married her younger sister Ethel, in Norway; until the passage of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act
Act of Parliament making it legal for the first time in the United Kingdom for a man to marry his dead wife's sister. in 1907, such a union was illegal in the United Kingdom.[6]
