Sir William Coldstream

London, Anthony d'Offay, William Coldstream: New Paintings, June – July 1984, no.21, illustrated in the catalogue;
London, Tate Gallery, The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, October 1990 – January 1991, no.74, illustrated in the catalogue.

 

Bruce Laughton, William Coldstream, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2004, p.300, fig.163.

The canvas is unlined. There are stretcher marks along each edge, but the most noticeable line is along the upper edge. There are some tiny lines of craquelure along the stretcher mark along the upper edge. Otherwise the paint surface is in good overall condition. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals some small spots of fluorescence in the upper left quadrant. These appear to be the marks of the artist. Held under glass in a painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The present painting is the last of a series of ten canvases that Coldstream produced from 1973-1983. Having sat on the Committee for the Government Art Collection, Coldstream had frequented a room on the seventeenth floor of the Department of the Environment building on Marsham Street from whose window there were remarkable aerial views of the surrounding area. Obtaining access to use the room when the building was closed, he used it regularly on weekend mornings all year round (the present work is meticulously dated on the stretcher with the dates of the fifty sessions of its execution) and the paintings that resulted provide a very interesting return to the architectural subject matter of his Italian and London paintings of the war years and immediately after.

Many of the Westminster series seem to delight in the chance juxtapositions and incongruities of new and old, that is such a noticeable feature of London architecture when seen from any position away from the familiar, and whilst the landmarks such as Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament feature in several of them, they are balanced out by the groups of inter-war housing, public buildings and surprisingly green spaces that huddle together in this area.

Of the series, Westminster X is perhaps the most abstracted, and although the methods and measurements which created the image are clearly evident, the view of Hawksmoor's west front of Westminster Abbey has a concentration on light and shadow rather than detail which gives it an atmospheric view not dissimilar to that seen in View Across the Arno at the Ponte Vecchio, Florence of 1945 (sold in the these rooms December 2006, lot 55).