By 1972 Coldstream had been Professor of the Slade for over twenty years. He had recently, in 1970, delivered the second ‘Coldstream Report’ to Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, which reviewed the structure and hierarchy of degrees in art education. A veritable establishment figure and a revered administrator, nonetheless Coldstream was on the cusp of a final flowering of extraordinary creativity, particularly upon his retirement from the Slade in 1975. This late and great phase of his career was in part precipitated by two commercial solo exhibitions with dealer Anthony d’Offay. Seated Nude (Catherine Tait), alongside another nude of the same period, Seated Nude (Catherine Kessler), was the first work purchased by d’Offay. Exhibited in Coldstream’s 1976 exhibition with d’Offay, Seated Nude (Catherine Tait) was purchased by Colin St John Wilson, renowned architect of the new British Library and the new wing at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, where Wilson bequeathed the work. Wilson sat for portraits by Coldstream and Michael Andrews at the request of d’Offay and wrote a fascinating account of their working methods: Coldstream’s painting required 96 sittings. Sparse, cool, verging on the bleak, the model, Catherine Tate, is seated naked, enclosed on three sides by moving panels. The fourth side is the picture plane – she is positioned in extreme proximity to the viewer and almost directly face-on. Subject to the viewer’s gaze in unforgiving openness, she makes no claims to beauty or embattled emotion, nor even particularly to encouraging psychological insight. Instead, Coldstream asserts the process of measuring, mark-making, and paint application in a way that approaches the performative. Acknowledging areas of a nude that are notoriously challenging – face, hands, knees – Coldstream encloses these passages with startlingly red notches of paint, drawing attention to the painstaking procedure of getting it ‘right’. Adrian Stokes, in his insightful essay introducing Coldstream’s 1990 retrospective at the Tate, wrote of Coldstream’s nudes: “…she is not to be interpreted, explained or flattered. She is a thing apart”. Physically close but psychically distant, the romanticism associated with the genre of the nude is subjected to Coldstream’s cool yet rigorous appraisal.