British Masters: In Search of England

The BBC's art output this year has been truly excellent; from pre-history to the dark ages and the 20th century there has been simple, sensitive and beautifully produced coverage. I stumbled onto the repeat of a series from a couple of years back which I hadn't seen before yesterday. British Masters traces a path through British painting. It has no great thesis or revolutionary scholarship but each episode shows a handful of artists from a particular period in the development of art, showcasing their work and contextualising it. Those of you who are regulars will have worked out that English landscape painting between the two world wars is phenomenally important to me and this happens to be what yesterday's episode concentrated on.

From a very personal point of view, the programme made Stanley Spencer a little more accessible to me; out of that entire generation of heavyweights he is the one that does least for me though I can appreciate his skill and his epic-ness. I think the fundamental difficulty I have is that we have no common ground. It also re-confirmed that I am inescapably a Nash-ite. The true value of the show though was that it showed me some work by John Piper I haven't seen before (I have to do a proper piece on him sooner or later) and reminded me about the quietest master of all, William Coldstream.

Coldstream thrashed around, directionless and lost, for some time before he found his calling. He ended up stripping all the glitz, glamour and pretension out of art. At his height between the wars, it was just him and a subject and the paintings did nothing more or less than show his subject with a beautiful, understated honesty. The quality is inescapable, but when your paintings are so quiet it is easy for the world to overlook them, easy to not notice them in a gallery, no matter how strong they are. In this instance there is an aptness to their beautiful invisibility; when a painting is about honestly depicting modern lives shouldn't it, as the programme said, be slow and dull, because that's how most people's lives are.