(1908 - 1987)
Sir William Coldstream was born in Northumberland and attended the Slade School of Art from 1926-1929. In 1937 he co-founded the Euston Road School of painting with Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore to paint ‘socially relevant’ subjects in a realist manner. He became Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1949 and, as a key art world official, he was appointed a trustee of the National Gallery in 1948 and of the Tate in 1949. He was awarded the CBE in 1952 and knighted in 1956. He worked very slowly, often only producing a few large paintings a year. As a result, his work was rarely shown in large solo exhibitions and his 1962 retrospective was his first one-person exhibition. Coldstream’s work is held in numerous public collections.
