In 1928, and in his final few months as a student at the Slade, Coldstream attended a series of evening lectures by Walter Sickert at the Bow and Bromley Commercial Evening Institute on ‘The Technique of Drawing and Painting’. A towering figure in the art world and doyenne of studio painting, Sickert left a memorable impression on the young Coldstream, revealing the mysteries of light, form, and perception presented by the studio. Still Life with Daisy was painted in Coldstream’s studio, 76 Charlotte Street, London, one of a group of early works including The Table, 1932; City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, and The Studio, 1932-3; Tate Gallery, Coldstream produced at the outset of his professional career. Foreshadowing the motifs that would dominate his life’s work, Coldstream constructed a composition for Still Life with Daisy that facilitated a complex, multifaceted investigation into a seemingly benignly prosaic scene. A lone daisy framed by twigs is arranged in a glass jar. The jar rests on a wooden chest that is pushed against a green fireplace or perhaps another upright chest. A book is propped on the ledge of the green chest whilst a ruler is placed to the left of the jar. With a handful of elements, Coldstream focuses on the subtlety of formal relations: the texture of the grain of wood as opposed to the delicacy of the daisy’s petals, the pattern of the twigs overlaid on the green chest, book, and wall, the hints of reflection on the glass jar suggesting the fall of light, the compositional progression stepping upwards in a diagonal from lower left to upper right, the tonality of brown modulating from the chest across the background.

Coldstream gave Still Life with Daisy as a gift to Victor Pasmore whom he had met in 1930. Together the two would found the Euston Road School in 1937 and join the teaching staff at Camberwell after World War II. By the 1950s, they had, artistically, taken divergent paths with Pasmore a leading figure in abstraction and Constructivism but they nonetheless held each other’s art in high esteem. In 1958, David Sylvester curated an exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons, placing works by Coldstream, Pasmore, and Bacon together in the first room. Sylvester wrote in the catalogue that the trio were “profoundly individualistic, idiosyncratic – in a way that is peculiarly English.” Coldstream and Pasmore’s mutual friend, William Townsend, recorded in his journal that “Bill always argues that Victor’s best painting is done when he is trying to represent something that he has in front of him…What Victor admires is the bold and exact and natural architecture of Bill’s early pictures and their lyrical feeling.” The romanticism of a domestic still-life is tempered by considered formal construction: the bold, exact, architectonic and lyrical are all present in Still Life with Daisy.