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.