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William Coldstream - British Artist From Art History

Art History - Historical Artists > C > William Coldstream

 

Historical Artist - William Coldstream (1908 - 1987)

After moving from Northumberland to London with his family in 1910, Sir William Coldstream studied at Slade School and joined the London Group. He focused on filmmaking for three years before returning to painting and joining the Euston Road School at the encouragement of Kenneth Clark. Coldstream’s conventional subject matters, urban scenes, portraits, and nudes, worked well with the school’s emphasis on figurative and realist painting. At the outbreak of WWII, Coldstream joined the Royal Artillery and then worked as a war artist in Cairo and Italy. He also wrote the Coldstream Report in 1960, an arts administration document that developed the art instruction techniques in the United Kingdom. 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 (usually centered on architecture), portraits, and the female nude. The Tate Gallery has several of his paintings.

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