Identity:

Arthur Leslie Collie was a sculptor, dealer and publisher of reduced copies of bronzes.

Life:

Collie was active between 1888 and 1897. He appears in the London street directories in 1889 as an 'art decorator' and in 1896 as a 'decorator and publisher of sculpture'. He was discussed in the Saturday Review on 31 May 1890 in an article entitled 'Small Bronzes'.

He shared premises with Thomas Agnew at 39b Old Bond Street, from where he published his reduced copies of bronzes, for example, of Sir William Hamo Thornycroft's General Gordon (1888, bronze, Victoria Embankment Gardens) on 6 May 1889. He also made reduced copies of Thornycroft's The Mower (1894, bronze) and Teucer (1889, bronze, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston). In 1890 he exhibited statuettes of Onslow Ford's Peace (1887, bronze, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), Thornycroft's General Gordon and an unidentified reduced sculpture of Frederic Leighton's, possibly The Sluggard, at the Arts and Crafts Society. His reduced version of Bertram Mackennal's Queen Victoria dates from 10 March 1897.

He used J. W. Singer & Co. of Frome to cast his work.

He had a business relationship with Alexander Reid. For instance he collaborated with Reid in showing the work of Monticelli in his Bond Street Gallery in 1892.

There is correspondence between Collie and John Tweed among the Tweed papers at Reading Art Gallery and Museum.

His collection was sold by Messrs Foster, London, 31 May-June 1905.

Bibliography:

'Small Bronzes', Saturday Review, 31 May 1890; Kelly's Post Office London Directory, London, 1889 and 1896; The Times, London , Monday, 12 June 1905, p. 14; Beattie, Susan, The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; Holt, Ysanne, British Artists and the Modernist Landscape, Aldershot, 2003, pp.41, 163 n.57; http://www.getty.edu/research (accessed 2003).