Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin was a French painter , close to the symbolist movement. Raphaël Collin initially studied at the School of Saint Louis in Paris. He later moved to Verdun and had Jules Bastien-Lepage as his classmate, with whom he became a close friend. Back in Paris, he became a pupil of William Bouguereau . He later changed master, preferring Alexandre Cabanel’s atelier , where he found his friend Lepage, Fernand Cormon , Aimé Morot and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant . In 1873 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon , where, in the following years, he received numerous prizes and awards. From 1872 to 1889 he collaborated with Théodore Deck on the realization ofdecorative majolica . Among his works of decorative painting stand the ceilings of the small “foyer” of the Teatro dell’Odéon and that of the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique . However, Collin was a painter of genre, portraits and nudes, decorative compositions and simple illustrations. The symbolist movement did not affect it any more than that much, and in any case only formally: beyond the subjects and the typical ways of this pictorial current always transpires from his works a strong personal characterization, alien from the languor of the symbolists . He was a keen collector of old terracotta lands , stoneware artefacts and oriental pottery; his collection of Japanese ceramics for the tea ceremony was purchased, a year after his death, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon . Collin died in Brionne at age 66.