William Coldstream became one of the significant twentieth-century cultural icons, who influenced generations of art students. Numbered amongst his cycle of distinguished luminaries were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, Sir Kenneth Clark, Adrian Stokes, A J Ayer and Anthony Blunt; as well as many artists and establishment figures whose portraits he painted, including one Prime Minister. However, celebrated Coldstream was to become he revealed a somewhat tormented and anxious mind racked with self-doubt. Was he ever going to be appreciated as an artist, will people understand his painting or will he ever gain control of his personal life? Coldstream liked to compartmentalize his life, and almost certainly none of his artistic friends knew all the facets of his extraordinarily complex, secretive and eccentric life; less so about his painting. Yet, this was in contrast to his outwardly lively, witty and charming public personality.
This publication will be the first complete catalogue raisonné and first comprehensive essay to critically scrutinize Coldstream's entire output, his singular painting method and to clarify his empiricist approach to objective realism, which hitherto has been largely misunderstood by art historians and critics. Each painting is chronologically described in full and accompanied by supportive text to place Coldstream's figurative painting within a cultural context.
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