Inez Spender (1937-38)

William Menzies, Sir Coldstream

oil on canvas

Tate, London, Liverpool and St Ives

Classification:

Painting

Materials:

Oil, Canvas

Physical Object Description:

Inscribed by the artist on top canvas return in ink ‘William Coldstream | Mrs Stephen Spender’

Dimensions:

77 x 101.8 cm

Accession Number:

N05883

Credit:

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 1949

Scheme:

Historic Purchase by Purchaser (1914-2008)

Ownership history:

Commissioned from the artist by Stephen Spender (1909-1995), 1937; from whom purchased by the Edward Le Bas (1904-1966) for the Contemporary Art Society, 1947; presented to the Tate Gallery, 1949

Relationship:

Edward Le Bas Stephen Harold Spender Tate, London, Liverpool and St Ives

Subject:

Woman, Portraits

William Coldstream made a series of portraits of his friends between 1936 and 1939. He was elected was elected to the AIA Central Committee in October 1938 and exhibited this portrait of the first wife of the poet Stephen Spender (1909-1995) at the Whitechapel Gallery AIA exhibition to great acclaim. It necessitated about forty sittings but was called 'a masterpiece of analytical realism'.

Spender commissioned the portrait of Inez - aka Marie Agnes Pearn and Elizabeth Lake (1913-1976) - during the couple's impetuous and short-lived marriage. Her clothes and her unusually short hair mark her out as part of an intellectual circle. In 1939 she left Spender for the poet Charles Madge (1912-1996) whom she married in 1942.

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