Peter Collins

Peter Collins was born in Inverness in 1935 into a distinguished medical family. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1952-58, enjoying post Diploma study and the prestigious Andrew Grant Scholarship. He subsequently taught at Duncan of Jordanson College of Art in Dundee and gained professional honours becoming an RSA and having work included in many public collections. His work is hard to characterise and includes several major portrait commissions, as well as work in frank acknowledgement of Picasso and Matisse. His style varied also from a superrealism deployed to depict an enigmatic, personal surrealism and broader techniques used as he saw fit for his subject. Collins had strong opinions on many things which made him a fascinating and sometimes challenging interlocutor and in the 1980s he began a period of intensive research on a number of Italian old master works he believed might have been misattributed. The Mantegna which Sir Timothy Clifford tried to acquire for the National Gallery of Scotland exercised his considerable critical appraisal in particular.

Peter Collins exhibited with The Scottish Gallery in 1968.