Charles Harold St John Hornby (1867-1946) was a founding partner of the newsagents and stationers W.H. Smith. This painting was commissioned by his fellow directors at the company. It belongs to a small group of fastidiously executed portraits that Coldstream made in the years between 1937, when he left the Film Unit of the General Post Office, and 1940, when he joined the Royal Artillery near the beginning of the Second World War. Others include Mrs Auden (1936-37, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery), E.A. Smith-Rewse (1937, Southampton City Art Gallery), and Winifred Burger (1937, Tate Collection) (fig. 1). All of these works are distinguished by the gently luminous quality of feathered brushstrokes, built up with great precision in asymmetric hatching which knits together the picture surface. This technique of tonal modelling was unique to Coldstream and it facilitated a quality of heightened naturalism in his work. Unlike Coldstream’s commissioned portraits from after the Second World War, in the 1950s and ’60s, these early works show only traces of the underlying draughtsmanship – an implicit armature suggested by a number of small ochre-orange lines spread across the surface of the painting, in the contours of the face and in the cuff, for instance. Coldstream’s later work became slightly mannered in the revelation of this armature, showing a greater and greater number of these orange marks as he approached the end of his career.