William Coldstream, the youngest child of Dr George Coldstream and his wife Lilian, was born in the doctor's house in West Street, Belford on 28th February 1908. William was born in Belford, but didn't remain in Belford long. After twelve years in rural Northumberland, Dr Coldstream decided to move his young family to London. And so, not long after William's first birthday, in the spring of 1909, while George made arrangements to sell the Belford practice and buy a house in London, the family moved to Village House on Bamburgh's Front Street. Like so many, then and now, Bamburgh was the Coldstream's holiday destination and had been for many years. They stayed in Bamburgh until, in the summer of 1910, then moved south to Kilburn in north-west London.
Apart from medicine, one of George Coldstream's interests was natural history, and he soon became a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. Numerous family visits were made to the London Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, just a couple of miles from the Coldstream's new home. The natural world became a longstanding interest for young William, who by the age of six was keeping rabbits and guinea pigs in hutches made from old tea chests.
William attended a number of schools in north London between the ages of 5 and 12, a time during which the First World War was raging in Europe. Eventually the war ended, but Coldstream's health became an increasing cause of concern: rheumatic fever left him with a suspected heart condition. Dr Coldstream decided that William would be best educated at home and engaged a tutor for him. In his mid-teens William attended the University Tutorial College, to prepare him for matriculation and, hopefully, entry into the medical profession. Though intelligent, he failed matriculation twice. Meanwhile, he had taken to visiting the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and met a friend's sister, then a student at the Slade School of Art.
Then, in 1925, at the age of 17, Coldstream met, through his circle of friends, a young undergraduate then at Christ Church, Oxford: the 18-year-old W H Auden, who never stopped talking, and whose pockets were stuffed with poems he had written. Although Coldstream and Auden were not to meet again for some nine years, fate was moving William away from the family traditions of medicine, the law, and the services, to something altogether different. On 12 April 1926, William Coldstream entered the Slade School of Art; the life of this Belford boy began to be the life of an artist.
By the time he finished studying at the Slade, William had still to find his own style; like so many others at this stage, he is experimenting. For a while, he was influenced by the French painters, Georges Braque and Heenri Matisse; then by the English artist, Walter Sickert, famous for his pictures of London's music halls. In July 1931, William married fellow aspiring artist, Nancy Sharp, the daughter of another doctor, who was soon to be his wife. They married despite strong opposition from Nancy's father who 'saw no prospects in his daughter marrying a painter'.
The 1930s were not easy years for Coldstream, artistically or personally. Financial pressures were exacerbated by the economic slump which affected so many. Relations with Nancy were strained as both tried make their names as painters; then, in September 1932, their first daughter, Juliet, was born. Coldstream was not making enough money from painting to support his young family, so something had to change.
In 1934, Coldstream, having declared, 'I am finished with painting', joined the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson, as a 'part-time freelance Assistant Director' on 30/- a week. He worked on films about the Post Office Savings Bank, the story of the wheel, locomotives, farming and Coal Face, about the mining industry. In the Film Unit his collaborators included W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. He continued to paint, however, and eventualy an annual stipend from Kenneth Clark (in response to the Plan for Artists that Coldstream wrote with his friend and fellow artist, Graham Bell) enabled him to return to full-time painting in 1937.
Later that same year, Coldstream, Claude Rogers, Graham Bell and Victor Pasmore, co-founded a School of Drawing and Painting, known as the Euston Road School, with which their circle would become synonymous. Though he became principally a portrait painter, Coldstream's political commitment was witnessed by his 1938 painting trip with Bell to Bolton, Lancashire as part of Mass Observation's social survey of Britain.
In 1940, he enlisted in the army and trained as a gunner until, again thanks to Kenneth Clark, commissioned as an official war artist in 1943. He travelled first to Egypt and on to Italy in 1944. He returned to London in July 1945 and joined the staff of Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in November. He became Head of Painting there in 1948, before being appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art, University College, London the following year.
Through his position at the Slade, Coldstream was appointed to numerous positions in the wider art. He was a Trustee of the National Gallery (1948-1963); Trustee of the Tate Gallery (1949-1963); Chairman of the Arts Panel, Arts Council of Great Britain (1953-1962); Board of Directors, the Royal Opera House (1957-1962); Chairman, National Advisory Council on Art Education (1958-1971), during which time two important reports were published under his name in 1960 and 1970: Vice-Chairman, Arts Council of Great Britain (1962-1970); Chairman, British Film Institute (1964-1971).
These responsibilities, which were rewarded by a CBE in 1952 and a knighthood in 1956, and his famously slow working methods restricted Coldstream's production to three or four paintings a year. As a result, he rarely showed his work: a touring retrospective in 1962 was his first one-person exhibition, though others followed in 1976 and 1984 at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. His marriage to Nancy having ended during the war, Coldstream had married his former model, Monica Hoyer, in 1961. He retired from the Slade in 1975 and, following some years of ill-health, died on 18th February 1987.