St. Pancras Station

Today I finished searching through William Coldstream’s personal correspondence.  Alas, no prized letter from Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge, or Humphrey Jennings…but that’s part of the adventure — you don’t always find what you want.  And you’ll never know what exactly is there until you do the leg-work and look through the ALL the files yourself.

But the great thing about having to look through EVERYTHING is that you find other documents that you never even suspected might exist.  After finishing up with the letters, I began rummaging through a few files of odd photographs.  Most were photographic reproductions of paintings that were commissioned in the early post-war period, those in public galleries, as well as many that have been lost or are held in private, unaccessible collections.  This was a great archival windfall because I won’t ever see many of these images any other place.

But the real success of the day was finding a particular photograph in a file of ephemera.  After his film career, Coldstream began painting in an acutely objective way.  One of these works was a painting of the platforms at St. Pancras Train Station created in the late 1930s.  My great finding was the actual photograph from which Coldstream worked, the surface of which is marked with Coldstream’s own penned grid marks that he used to transfer the image.  As the English would say, I was absolutely gobsmacked!  In my hands I was holding the same image held by Coldstream while creating one of his most famous paintings.

Tomorrow, portraits…stay tuned.