Sir William Coldstream

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, where acquired by Colin St John Wilson, 1st April 1981 for £6,750

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, William Coldstream, 13th October - 12th November 1976, cat. no.4;
New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art, Eight Figurative Painters, 14th October 1981 - 3rd January 1982, cat. no.28, illustrated, with tour to Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara;
London, Tate Gallery, The Hard Won Image: Traditional Method and Subject in Recent British Art, 4th July - 9th September 1984, cat. no.32, illustrated;
London, Tate Gallery, The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, 17th October 1990 - 6th January 1991, cat. no.49, illustrated, with South Bank Centre tour to Newport Art Gallery & Museum, Newport, Castle Museum, Norwich and  Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester;
London, Tate Gallery, June 1992 - May 2001, on long-term loan from the collection of Colin St John Wilson;
London, Timothy Taylor Gallery, The Artist at Work, Michael Andrews and William Coldstream, 25th May - 5th June 1999, where lent by Colin St John Wilson;
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Highlights of the Wilson Collection, 1st October 1999 - 9th January 2000, where lent by Colin St John Wilson;
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Best of British II: The Art of Drawing and Painting, 21st January - 19th March 2000, where lent by Colin St John Wilson;
London, ING Barings Collection, The Wilson Collection, 17th June - 7th September 2000, where lent by Colin St John Wilson;
London, Browse & Derby, Exhibition of Some Paintings to Accompany the Book Launch of William Coldstream by Bruce Laughton, 13th July 2004;
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, June 2006 - August 2012, on long-term loan from the Wilson Collection.

'“Painting Given Subjects”, An Interview with David Sylvester', Burlington Magazine, vol.119, no.889, April 1977;
Bruce Laughton, William Coldstream, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004, p.264, illustrated, fig.125.

Unexamined out of frame. The work is float-mounted, with the visible edges. There are a few very minor isolated spots of fine craquelure, including one or two spots to the face, torso and legs of the figure, as well as to the chair (upper right) and wall (upper centre). There are one or two further isolated lines visible upon closer inspection. There also appears to be a very small spot of paint loss just to the left of the figure's right knee. This excepting the work appears to be in very good condition. The Perspex gives a difficult reading under ultraviolet light, however there appear no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed behind Perspex, and float-mounted within a tight light-wood box frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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In the field of 20^thcentury British representational art, and specifically portraiture, Coldstream’s contribution has been quiet but significant. While unwilling to diverge markedly from conventional appearance in the louder manner of some of his contemporaries, the surface markings that define Coldstream’s paintings reveal a complex and mysterious approach of comparable influence and originality.

An insight into Coldstream’s working methods has been fascinatingly documented by Colin St John Wilson himself, who sat for Coldstream in 1982, the portrait completed after ninety-six sittings; ‘Well I reckon that I can’t really produce anything that’s got any way really under about sixty hours’ work’ (Coldstream interviewed by David Sylvester, 13^th April 1962, published in The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987 exh. cat., London, 1990, p.25). Wilson recalled that their first sitting got off to a false start – Coldstream had arrived with a canvas too small: ‘I had the impertinence to say that I wanted it to match the size and proportion of the wonderful Seated Nude of 1973-4 [the present work]…one of my dearest possessions’ (Colin St John Wilson, ‘On William Coldstream’s Method’, The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, exh. cat., London, 1990, p.40).

Sitting for Coldstream, Wilson noted the implements used by him, which included ‘tape measure; ruler; plumb line and weight…’, and describes some of the techniques he employed: ‘holding the ruler at a certain angle (joining left ear to crown?) he would transfer the parallel line by painting along the edge of the ruler… Sometimes he held down a point with his finger until he could mark it with the brush’ (ibid, p.42). Such insights give clues to the subtle but integral markings of Coldstream’s paintings, which themselves hint at the logical character of the artist.

On one level, the marks were a means of providing a methodical approach to the difficulties of representation: ‘It seems less willed if you’re measuring it. If you’re trying to get something going by your own will power, without reference to something that seems impersonal, it gives me a sense of distaste’ (Coldstream quoted in The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, exh. cat., London, 1990, p.28). But the marks went beyond a simple aid to accuracy of transcription. Coldstream had a deep interest in things in their own right and their relationships to one another: ‘I get intense pleasure when I’m painting in just saying that this is two-thirds that; that is one-sixteenth more than that’ (ibid, p.27). Confronted with the objects in front of him, Coldstream sought to draw out their hidden order rather than impose an order from the outside. When David Sylvester asked Coldstream why he had not moved the radiogram seen behind the nude’s head in the present work out of sight – an odd conjunction with the empty fireplace and large armchair – he replied it was very heavy, then added that he did ask himself, ‘what on earth am I doing painting a radiogram behind a lady with her clothes off at nine o’clock in the morning? So I thought – there it is, that’s the situation; we go on’ (Bruce Laughton, op. cit., p.262). Typically, each scenario was a challenge to be accepted, rather than manipulated.

The series of differing marks seen in Coldstream’s work, emphatic in the present painting, emerged as he carried out revisions to previous measurements, ensuring he kept his pictures in check, ‘within the limits of the game’ (Coldstream quoted in The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, exh. cat., London, 1990, p.28). Fixing points in the picture, the marks became, as Wilson described, the ‘scaffolding’ of the work. In studying them more intently, ‘there is the growing realisation of the presence in the picture of measure so insistent that it must be acknowledged as some kind of a module, and the relationships as a form of harmonic order’ (Wilson quoted in The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908-1987, exh. cat., London, 1990, p.46). It is this sense of rhythm and the beauty of the surface created by the markings which give such pleasure, not only to Coldstream himself, but to us the viewers.  

Seated Nude was painted in the first-floor drawing room at Ann Stokes’ house in Church Row, Hampstead (Adrian had died in 1973). It was the first nude he had painted away from the Slade since he began painting nudes there in 1952, and is regarded as one of his finest. The model was Willa Askew, a young America who although not a professional model, sits like one, apparently quite detached from Coldstream’s painting process.