ABSTRACT
In March 2004 the National Art Collections Fund announced Wilson's donation of his collection to the nation, confirming it as the largest gift of modern and contemporary art ever given through the Fund. As a devotee of Stokes, of building and of painting, Wilson shares the sense of architectonic brotherhood between the surfaces of architecture and the graphic arts - as his account of Coldstream confirms. Wilson was absorbed by Byzantine architecture at the time and 'sensed in Colquhoun's figures a hieratic monumentality and a Parisian provenance that promised a seriousness of a very different order from the wishy-washy war-time "romantics". In The Artist at Work, Wilson's deeply felt study of the working methods of William Coldstream and Michael Andrews, based on his experience both as friend and as the object of their gaze, he expands on the shared methods of the 'carving' architect and artist.
