Charles Darwin
John Collier (1850 to 1934) · 1883, replica of the 1881 original
Darwin stands wrapped in a heavy black cloak, a soft hat in his hand, his long white beard spread across his chest and his face turned slightly away as if he has just paused on a walk. The background is a plain dark wall. He is seventy two years old, in the last year of his life, and the painter has given him the gravity of a prophet while keeping the gentleness that everyone who met him remarked on. It is the image of Darwin that most people know.
John Collier, a young painter who had married into the family of Darwin's great ally Thomas Huxley, painted the original in eighteen eighty one for the Linnean Society, the body that had first heard the theory of natural selection announced. This version is a replica Collier made two years later for the gallery. Look at the eyes under the heavy brows, which are tired but kind, and at the plain handling of the cloak, which gives the figure its monumental shape. Darwin's son Francis said the portrait was the best likeness of his father ever made.
The gallery commissioned the replica in eighteen eighty three, a year after Darwin died and was buried in Westminster Abbey. It hangs among the Victorians who changed the way people thought, and it is usually surrounded by visitors from all over the world. The cloak and hat were Darwin's own everyday clothes for his daily walks along the sandwalk at Down House, so the painting shows the scientist as a countryman rather than a laboratory figure.
Did You Know? Darwin's son Francis considered this the best portrait of his father, and the cloak and hat were the clothes Darwin wore on his daily thinking walks.
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