Over eighty hours or so working from a life model, William Coldstream constructed the rarest of paintings in his career—a standing nude.
InSght No. 176
William Coldstream, Girl Exposing her Throat to a Dog, 1977–78
Slow-working painters make challenging demands of their life models. William Coldstream (1908–1987) was unexceptional in this respect. The painter Jane Carter (née Ford), who modelled for Standing Nude, remembered that Coldstream was circumspect about approaching her: he did not like to pose the question outright. ‘Bill never said directly “will you pose”’, she later wrote to Bruce Laughton. ‘But for a while he kept saying he was looking for a model who could stand up instead of sitting down. This went on for some time […] Of course it became clear that he was egging me towards being a volunteer.’
Only twice in his career did Coldstream paint a nude model in a standing position. The first was made in 1937 and the next followed forty years later. All life modelling places the body of the model under a degree of physical strain, but only personal experience will tell precisely how much more difficult it is to stand still—rather than to sit or recline—for an hour or two. Although Coldstream made an initial preparatory drawing of Jane Carter, it was not used as a source for the painting—it rather functioned as a means of establishing the composition—and he worked on Standing Nude exclusively from life. And so the painter’s progress depended on her stamina over an extended period.
Coldstream maintained annual pocket diaries for much of his career. They include a mixture of appointments (‘foot hospital’, etc.) and retrospective documentation of time spent working on paintings. Besides early diaries for 1948, 1949 and 1962, a continuous run for 1974–1987 is preserved in the Tate Archive. Standing Nude was made in 1977 and 1978, and the diaries for these years provide a detailed understanding of the painting’s progress. Life sessions with Jane Carter (or Ford as she was then) are indicated by her initials and how many hours they lasted, a typical entry being that made on Thursday 9 February 1978: ‘JF 1hr’.
Coldstream’s diaries record seventy-seven sessions with Jane Carter. The first happened on 1 June 1977 and the last on 3 July 1978. Most were an hour but some lasted two or three. Almost immediately after work began there was an extended pause that lasted between July and October. But then painting resumed, and there were often two or three sessions a week. In October 1977, for instance, Carter modelled for twenty hours. Rarely has a painter recorded so fastidiously not just the works they completed, but also the effort of labour involved in completing them.
Like his one-time sitter Lucian Freud, who felt a lingering fascination for the illustrations in J. H. Breasted’s book Geschichte Ägyptens, Coldstream derived transient inspiration from ancient Egyptian visual culture. Regarding the composition of Standing Nude, he told Jane Carter that ‘the idea for the frontal pose had come from an Egyptian figure with one foot slightly forwards’. Notwithstanding those austere origins, the painting itself is light-filled and there is much dexterity apparent in the skein of the painting.
Certain parts of the figure are overwritten with touches of black and vermillion. These somehow helped Coldstream to register the linear measurements he made during life sessions. Sometimes these appear simply as dots. On the sitter’s left leg, vermillion paint creates a criss-cross (+) over a point of black. These notations are not universally vertical and horizontal, and around the arms and hands they occasionally serve to emphasise the silhouette. Around this superficial armature, the surfaces in the picture are modelled with broken, dappled touches of the brush. They create a warm, tonal relationship of lights and darks. Light entered the room and illuminated the figure from the right, and there is a definite spatial relationship between the model and the wall behind her. Each application of painting registered an observation, painstakingly accumulated over weeks and months, and finally cohered to produce a complete artwork that surpasses the piecemeal effort by which it was brought about.
