Sir William Menzies Coldstream (February 28, 1908 –
February 18, 1987) was a British realist painter and a long standing art teacher.
Biography
Born in Northumberland, he grew up in London and studied at the Slade School of Art, where he
met and married Nancy Sharp. He co-founded the Euston
Road School with Graham Bell and others in 1937. He enlisted in the Royal Artillery at the start of the war but he
was appointed a War Artist in 1943, working in Egypt and
Italy.
In 1949 he returned to lead the Slade School as Professor of Fine Art, and, in 1952 he became a CBE. He was Chairman of the National Advisory
Council on Art Education between 1958 and 1971. He was also Chairman
of the British Film Institute from 1964 to
1971 (he had worked with John Grierson in the
GPO Film Unit for a few years in the 1930s). He retired
from the Slade School in 1975 and continued to paint until a couple of years before his death.
Method and works
Coldstream was committed to painting directly from life. His type of realism had its basis in careful measurement, carried out
by the following method: standing before the subject to be painted, a brush is held upright at arm's length. With one eye closed,
the artist can, by sliding a thumb up or down the brush handle, take the measure of an object or interval. This finding is
compared against other objects or intervals, with the brush still kept at arm's length. Informed by such measurements, the artist
can paint what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective. The
surfaces of Coldstream's paintings carry many small horizontal and vertical markings, where he recorded these coordinates so that
they could be verified against reality.
As a result of his painstaking methods, Coldstream worked slowly, often taking scores of sittings over several months to
complete a work. His subjects include still-life, landscapes which are usually urban, portraits, and the female nude.
The Tate Gallery has several of his paintings.
References
- Gowing, Lawrence; Sylvester, David (1990). The Paintings of William Coldstream 1908–1987. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN
1-85437-048-0
- Wilcox, Tim, et al. (1990). The Pursuit of the Real: British figurative painting from Sickert to Bacon. London: Lund
Humphries. ISBN 0-85331-571-X
- Laughton, Bruce (2004), William Coldstream. New Haven: Paul Mellon Center for British Art.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
