Jacob Collins was born on August 11, 1964, in New York City, New York, United States to a family of artists and scholars. A famous art historian Meyer Schapiro is his great-uncle.
Collins was fascinated by the art since his early childhood. A youngster, he made replicas of the artworks by the great masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So, Collins made a decision to become a painter of classical style at a very young age.
Jacob Collins started his artistic education at the New York Studio School in 1983. In 1986, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the Columbia College.
In 1987, Collins entered the New York Academy of Art where he spent one year. Then, Jacob pursued his artistic training at the Art Students League which he left in 1989.
To develop his painting skills, as a student, he often made copies of the artworks at the American and European museums, including Musée du Louvre, the Museo del Prado and the Uffizi Gallery.
Among Collins’ teachers were such painters as Aaron Kurzen, Ted Seth Jacobs, and Michael Aviano, and a sculptor Martine Vaugel.
Jacob Collins started his professional journey from the portrait commissions which he presented among his other works at his debut solo show at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York City in 1992. This one was followed the same year by a solo exhibition at Meredith Long & Company in Houston, Texas. In fact, during the 1990s, the artist had many solo exhibitions, in particular at the Gallery One in Toronto (1993), at John Pence Gallery of San Francisco (1994-1997), at Meredith Long & Company in Houston (1995, 1997, 1999), and at Spanierman Gallery in New York City (1998).
Despite his painting activity, Collins had been involved in a teaching process since the early 1990s. So, he had a night course at the National Academy of Art and later, he founded his own art institution called the Water Street Atelier which the main goal was to teach classical art style.
In 2006, Collins established his other educational project named The Grand Central Academy of Art and became its director. The main concept of the institution was based on the methods of the 15th and 19th centuries ateliers, in particular, cast drawing and grisaille painting, progressing through to figure drawing and ultimately to figure painting.
The next year, Jacob organized the school Hudson River Fellowship meant to help the development of the modern art movements.
One of the recent artist’s educational projects, the campus in a former warehouse in Long Island City, near the Museum of Modern Art. It is made for about 50 painters who have attended or attend Collins’s intense multiyear program, his classes and workshops.
Jacob Collins made a great contribution to the revival and the development of the classical art traditions by founding and directing such art institutions as the Water Street Atelier, The Grand Central Academy of Art, and the Hudson River Fellowship.
Collins’ talent in classical art is recognized by many commissions to portray well-know personalities, among which are J. Paul Getty Jr., the President of the United States George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.
Peter
Fire Island Sunset
Green Island
Red Head
Vincent
Self Portrait with Palette
Interior
Candace Profile
Chocolate Easter Eggs
Seated Nude
Afternoon Surf, Fire Island
Peonies in a Square Glass
Paper with Drawing Instruments
Paintbrushes in a Can
Autumn Landscape
Tomato, Broccoli, Olive Oil
Walkway
Violin and Music
Banjo with Drawing
Peonies in a Silver Cup
Gangsta
River Vista
In the Studio
Apple Tree, Normandy
Geranium Pots, Tuscany
Early Morning, Schoharie Creek
Irises
Afternoon Interior II
Interior
Pastoral Landscape Morning
Quotations:
“If a person wants to be contemporary, that’s OK, but there was a time when I realized that I didn’t have to be painting a Pontiac or the space shuttle. In Michelangelo, for example, you wouldn’t see what 15th-century Florentines wore, or their little technological appurtenances.”
“Beauty is a set of ideas, it is vastly complicated, and to understand whether something is beautiful, you’re using anthropology and psychology, and culture and nature, and even biology. You have to understand what ‘beauty’ is to know why you think something is beautiful.”
“I always wanted to do two things: to be skillful and to make beautiful art.”
“Woven into my work is a love for a particular group of painters, and a willingness to submit to a reverence for that world. That could easily lead a person to become slavish, to lose his or her own voice, but I think in my case it is my voice. I love those artists, and I want to be one of those artists, to speak very directly in the language that I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn.”
Jacob Collins married an American writer, Ann Brashares. Her most notable book is The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.
The couple has three sons, whose names are Nathaniel, Samuel and Isaiah, and one daughter named Susannah.
