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.