After a brilliant, prize-winning career at the Slade School of Art, William Coldstream graduated in the year of a recession. “Through making money much harder to come by”, his generation was forced by the economic slump that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash “to be interested in economics and then in politics. I had sort of social realist ideas”, he remembered, “in a sense that I would like to paint a sort of portrait which most people who might not know an enormous amount about painting would find interesting.” Between 1934 and 1937, he abandoned painting to work General Post Office film unit, collaborating with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. It was “a great change from being shut up in a studio and knowing only artists”, and brought him to the conclusion that, to paint popularly, it would have been necessary to possess “a very big visual vocabulary, that is to say a power to supply the imagination immediately – with some kind of formula, you see? And the power to illustrate, in fact, an illustrative power, which I was singularly lacking in.