Collaborative representation-based classification (CRC) and sparse RC (SRC) have recently achieved great success in face recognition (FR). Previous CRC and SRC are originally designed in the real setting for grayscale image-based FR. They separately represent the color channels of a query color image and ignore the structural correlation information among the color channels. To remedy this limitation, in this paper, we propose two novel RC methods for color FR, namely, quaternion CRC (QCRC) and quaternion SRC (QSRC) using quaternion ell -{1}minimization. By modeling each color image as a quaternionic signal, they naturally preserve the color structures of both query and gallery color images while uniformly coding the query channel images in a holistic manner. Despite the empirical success of CRC and SRC on FR, a few theoretical results are developed to guarantee their effectiveness. Another purpose of this paper is to establish the theoretical guarantee for QCRC and QSRC under mild conditions. Comparisons with competing methods on benchmark real-world databases consistently show the superiority of the proposed methods for both color FR and reconstruction.