Charles Allston Collins (1828 - 1873)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

British painter, writer, and illustrator associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Son of the painter William Collins RA. His older brother was the novelist Wilkie Collins. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1844 to study painting. He exhibited 14 works at the RA annual exhibition between 1847-1854.

Collins married Charles Dickens’s daughter Kate, also a painter, in 1860.

In the late 1850s he abandoned art to follow his brother into a writing career. His most successful literary works were humorous essays collected together under the title The Eye Witness (1860).