Career
She came from Wanganui. Her work is largely unknown at home and overseas. After a thorough although conservative art education at the Technical School in Wanganui, Edith Collier left New Zealand in 1913 for Street John"s Wood School of Art in London.
She was then aged 27.
Rapidly disillusioned, and feeling marginalised as an expatriate woman painter, she became more influenced by other expatriates in London, and was to enjoy greater success through exhibiting with the Society of Women Artists and Women"s International Art Club - venues outside the art establishment - and became a significant Modernist painter. Collier returned to New Zealand in 1922 as an experienced artist with innovative ideas, but as a spinster in provincial Wanganui received harsh treatment, including what Drayton describes as savage, critical assessment and negative response from her own community.
In a well-known incident her father burned many of her best paintings, including her nudes. She died in 1964. A street is named after her in the suburb of Street Johns Hill, Wanganui.
