Inez Spender
- Artist: Sir William Coldstream
- Date: 1937–8
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 770 x 1018 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
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About this artwork
This is the “Inez Spender” by Sir William Coldstream, finished in 1938 after he had just returned to painting from a stint as a documentary filmmaker. The work is a tight, analytical portrait of Inez Spender – the poet Stephen Spender’s wife – who first met him in 1936 and married him the next month. Coldstream spent about forty sittings, keeping a meticulous measuring register on the canvas that you can actually see as small brown and red marks. He used those to map the distances between the sitter’s nose, elbow, shoulders and the sofa, a technique born out of the Euston Road School’s insistence on objective observation.
The picture shows her with short hair and a folded arm, perched on a couch, her posture slightly awkward because of the high viewpoint – her knees and thighs sit in a bit of a geometric puzzle. The face is rendered in thin, vertical brushstrokes, while the coat and background are handled more loosely, giving the piece a subtle tension between precision and softness. Critics have called it a “tour de force” of analytical realism and one of the few timeless English portraits that feel purely realistic.
Coldstream commissioned this piece in late 1937; it was first shown at the Whitechapel Gallery’s AIA exhibition to great acclaim and later travelled to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1949 it was presented to the Contemporary Art Society and now hangs in the Archive Gallery.
See it in person
Inez Spender is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
