A fastidious disdain of poetry

If William Coldstream (1909-87) was a dull painter, as he is sometimes thought to be, he was most certainly not a dull man. An artist who spent much of his life in a three-piece suit, an administrator with ‘an irresistible urge to turn a serious story into farce’, he was captivating in conversation, a natural entertainer whose slightly shrivelled charm reminded more than one person of Fred Astaire. Described by his friend W. H. Auden as one ‘whose tongue is the most malicious I know’, Coldstream was also self-effacing as a teacher, modest, inhibited, given to depression and nervous breakdown, intimidating to some, fascinating, kindly. A complicated man, he had a complicated (and rather unsatisfactory) love-life, handled by his biographer with an admirable balance between frankness and discretion.

If he was a dull painter it was deliberately so — he chose to be prosy — ‘anyone’, he said, ‘could get away with poetry’; but at his best, as Bruce Laughton puts it, the controlling mind worked in harmony with a lyric sensibility. Espousing throughout his career a kind of realist painting that was spectacularly out of kilter with the fashionable artistic preoccupations of the day (he admitted later that there was an element of snobbism in painting realistic pictures when so few were doing it), he nevertheless presided — ‘the prime minister of British art’ — over a particularly fruitful and innovative period of British artistic life, scrupulous in not imposing his own artistic views on others. He was head of the Slade from 1949-75, chaired the Coldstream Reports which re-organised art-school teaching in the 1960s, held innumerable trusteeships and exercised his quick-wittedness and diplomatic skills on innumerable committees. In between times he painted soldiers and bishops and captains of industry, very slowly.

Coldstream wanted to be a doctor like his father (who was also a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society and an excellent knitter), but although he went to a prep school so reverential about games that a boy was expelled for farting as he boxed, his formal education more or less ended when he caught rheumatic fever at the age of 11, and he did not pass the necessary exams.