The Honorable John Maler Collier (27 January 1850 – 11 April 1934) was a leading English painter and an author. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Collier studied painting at the Munich Academy where he enrolled at the age of 25. He was from a talented and successful family: his grandfather, John Collier, was a Quaker merchant who became a Member of the Parliament; his father (first Lord Monkswell) also was a Member of the Parliament, Attorney General and, for many years, a full-time judge of the Privy Council, and a member of the Royal Society of British Artists; and John’s older brother (the second Lord Monkswell) was Under-Secretary of the State for War and Chairman of the London County Council. 

In due course, Collier became an integral part of the family of Thomas Henry Huxley PC, President of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885 - he married two of Huxley's daughters in succession and was "on terms of intimate friendship" with his son, the writer Leonard Huxley. Collier's first wife, in 1879, was Marian (Mady) Huxley. She was a painter who studied, like her husband, at the Slade and exhibited at the Royal Academy among other places. After the birth of their only daughter, she suffered severe post-natal depression and was taken to Paris for treatment, where she contracted pneumonia and died in 1887. In 1889 Collier married Mady's younger sister Ethel Huxley. Until the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act in 1907 such a marriage was not possible in England, so the ceremony took place in Norway. Collier's daughter by his first marriage, Joyce, was a portrait miniaturist, and a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. By his second wife he had a daughter and a son, Sir Laurence Collier, who was the British Ambassador to Norway from 1941 to 1951. 

Collier died in 1934. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (published in 1949) compares his work to that of Frank Holl because of its solemnity. This is only true, however, of his many portraits of distinguished old men. In contrary, his portraits of younger men, women, and children, and his so-called "problem pictures" covering scenes of ordinary life, are often very bright and fresh, with strong and surprising sense of color, which, according to Geoffrey Ashton “created a disconcerting verisimilitude in both mood and appearance".

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