Stanley Spencer

This article is about the artist. For the balloonist, see Stanley Spencer (aeronaut).

Sir Stanley Spencer
Self-portrait, 1959, final year of his life
Born	Stanley Spencer (1891-06-30)30 June 1891 Cookham, England
Died	14 December 1959(1959-12-14) (aged 68) Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, England
Nationality	English
Education	Maidenhead Technical Institute; The Slade
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Resurrection, Cookham
Awards	Knighted in 1959
Patron(s)	Louis and Mary Behrend

Sir Stanley Spencer KCB CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Well known for his work depicting Biblical scenes, from miracles to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, occurring as if in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent much of his life, Spencer was also a war artist, acting in this official capacity in WWII. Furthermore, he was an accomplished landscape artist and portrait painter. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven." In his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are modeled as their Gospel counterparts, lending Christian teachings an eerie immediacy. Cookham houses the Stanley Spencer Gallery, whilst one of Spencer's famous large-scale works, commemorating events in WWI, is in the Sandham Memorial Chapel.

Biography

Early life

Self-portrait, 1914

Spencer was born and spent much of his life in Cookham in Berkshire. His father, William Spencer, was a music teacher. His mother born Anna Caroline Slack, was universally known as Annie. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), also became a notable artist, principally for his landscapes. Stanley Spencer was the eighth surviving child of Annie and William Spencer. Grandfather Julius Spencer was a master builder who built at least two of Spencers' homes - the family home "Fernlea" on Cookham High Street, and the home he shared for a while with his sister Annie at Cliveden View, on the High Road in Cookham Rise. Spencer's childhood was full of music, literature and conversation. His father read out loud with the family and encouraged lively debate and argument at the dinner table. A small school was set up in the garden at 'The Nest,' next door to Fernlea, which was run by his sisters Annie and Florence. Their reading often included Bible stories. They also made music and took nature walks through the local countryside. The influences of the Bible, nature and Cookham are clearly strong threads through much of his lifetime’s work.

Stanley was small and wiry and had a very energetic personality. He would talk for hours with his mind flying free. He would write his thoughts on every aspect of his work and left behind a vast archive of letters, notes and jottings. After his informal schooling he was sponsored by Lady Boston of Hedsor to attend the Maidenhead Technical Institute, where his father insisted he should not take any exams.

From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. So profound was his attachment to the village of his birth that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. It even became his nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself took to using for a time.

In 1912 Spencer exhibited the painting John Donne Arriving in Heaven and some drawings at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition organised by Roger Fry in London. The same year he painted The Nativity for which he won a Slade Composition Prize and he also began painting Apple Gathers which was shown in the first Contemporary Art Society exhibition the following year. In 1914 Spencer completed Zacharias and Elizabeth and The Centurion's Servant and began work on a self-portrait.

World War I

After a long period of agonizing whether or not to join up, in 1915 Spencer volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort Hospital, Bristol. In 1916, the 24-year-old Spencer volunteered for service with the RAMC in Macedonia, and served with the 68th Field Ambulance unit. He subsequently volunteered to be transferred to the Berkshire Regiment. His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows, including his elder brother Sydney, who was killed in action during September 1918, indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations come through time and again in his religious works. Stanley Spencer returned to England at the end of 1918 and went to live in Cookham.

1919

Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919) (Art.IWM ART 2268)

In 1919 he was commissioned by the War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to paint a large work for a proposed, but never built, Hall of Remberance. The resulting painting, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, now in the Imperial War Museum, was clearly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. He wrote,

"About the middle of September 1916 the 22nd Division made an attack on Machine Gun Hill on the Doiran Vardar Sector and held it for a few nights. During these nights the wounded passed through the dressing stations in a never-ending stream."

The dressing station was an old Greek church which Spencer drew such that, with the animal and human onlookers surrounding it, it would recall depictions of the birth of Christ, but to Spencer the wounded figures on the strechers spoke of Christ on the Cross while the lifesaving work of the surgeons represented the Resurrection. He wrote,

"I meant it not a scene of horror but a scene of redemption." And also, "One would have thought that the scene was a sordid one...but I felt there was grandeur...all those wounded men were calm and at peace with everything, so the pain seemed a small thing with them."

1920-1926

Spencer lived in Cookham until April 1920 when he moved to Bourne End to stay with Henry Slesser and his wife. Whilst there he worked on a series of paintings for an 'oratory'. In 1921 Spencer worked on a mural designs for a village hall war memorial scheme which was never completed. In 1923 Spencer spent the summer in Poole, Dorset with the artist Henry Lamb. Whilst there he worked on sketch designs for another possible war memorial scheme. These designs convinced two early patrons of Spencer's work, Louis and Mary Behrend, to commission a group of paintings as a memorial to Mary's brother, Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who had died in the war. The Behrends planned to build a chapel in the village of Burghclere in Berkshire to house the paintings. In October 1923, Spencer started renting Henry Lamb's studio in Hampstead where he began work on The Resurrection, Cookham, which he would not complete until 1927 when Lord Duveen purchased the picture and presented it to the Tate. Also in 1927, Spencer held his first solo exhibition, at the Goupil Gallery, before moving to Burghclere to begin work on the Sandham Memorial Chapel for the Behrends.

Burghclere, 1927-1932

The Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere was a colossal undertaking. Spencer's paintings cover a twenty-one foot high, seventeen-and-half foot wide end wall, eight seven foot high lunettes, each above a predella, with two twenty-eight feet long irregularly shaped strips between the lunettes and the ceiling. The sixteen paintings are double hung on opposite walls akin to the progression of alterpieces in a Renaissance church nave. The scenes were based on Spencer's experiences at the Beaufort Hospital and in Macedonia during World War One. The series begins with a lunette depicting shell-shocked troops arriving at the gates of Beaufort, continues with a scene of kit inspection at the RAMC Training Depot in Hampshire before opening out to scenes of Macedonia. The end wall depicts the Resurrection of the Soldiers.

Whilst working at Burghclere, Spencer also undertook other commissions including a series of pen-and-ink sketches for a 1927 almanack and a 1929 series of five paintings for the Empire Marketing Board.

1932-1939

In 1932 Spencer and his family moved to a large house off the High Street in Cookham. Here Spencer painted observational studies of his surroundings and other landscapes, which would become the major themes of his work over the following years. During 1932 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and exhibited ten works at the Venice Biennale. In 1933 Patricia Preece first modelled for Spencer and when he visited Switzerland that summer, to paint landscapes, she joined him there. In 1935 the Royal Academy rejected two pictures, Saint Francis and the Birds and The Dustman or The Lovers, which Spencer had submitted for the Academy Summer Exhibition and Spencer resigned from the Academy in protest. When he returned to Switzerland in 1935, Patricia Preece travelled with him and when they returned to Cookham, Spencer's wife Hilda Carline moved to Hampstead. Preece began to manage Spencer's finances and he signed the deeds of his house over to her. Spencer painted naked portraits of Preece in 1935 and 1936 and, also in 1936, a double nude portrait of himself and Preece, Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. This was followed, in 1937, by Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife, known as the Leg of mutton nude, a painting never publicly exhibited during Spencer's lifetime. In a futile attempt to be reconciled with Hilda, Spencer went to stay with her in Hampstead for ten days. Her rejection of this approach is the basis of Hilda, Unity and Dolls, which Spencer painted during that visit. During the winter of 1937, alone in Southwold, Suffolk, he begin a series of paintings, The Beatitdes of Love, about ill-matched couples. In October 1938 Spencer moved to London spending six weeks with John Rothenstein before moving to a bedsit in Swiss Cottage where he started work on the Christ in the Wilderness series. By September 1939, he was staying at Leonard Stanley in Gloucestershire with the artists George and Daphne Charlton. Spencer created many important works in his room above the bar of the White Hart Inn which he used as a studio, including Us in Gloucestershire and The Wool Shop.

Spencer's work as a war artist in the Second World War included his epic depiction of shipbuilding workers and their families at Port Glasgow on the Clyde. When the war ended he again took up, as did certain other British neo-romantic artists of the time, his visionary preoccupations — in Spencer's case with a sometimes apocalyptic tinge.

Marriages and later years

Dorothy Hepworth (far left), Preece and Spencer (wearing spectacles) at his wedding with Preece

In 1925, Spencer married Hilda Carline, then a student at the Slade and sister of the artist Richard Carline. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930. Spencer met the artist Patricia Preece in 1929 in Cookham. He became infatuated with her. Hilda divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later he married Preece, who persuaded him to sign over his house to her; she, however, was a lesbian. She continued to live with her partner, Dorothy Hepworth, and though she frequently posed nude for her husband, she refused to consummate the marriage. When Spencer’s bizarre relationship with Preece finally fell apart (though she would never grant a divorce), he would visit Hilda, an arrangement that continued throughout the latter's subsequent mental breakdown. Hilda died from cancer in November 1950. The painful intricacies of this three-way relationship became the subject in 1996 of a play by the feminist playwright Pam Gems. Titled Stanley, it starred Anthony Sher, at the National Theatre and, later, on Broadway. Nominated for a Tony Award, it won the Olivier Best New Play award for 1997.

Spencer has been the subject of several biographies. The diminutive survivor of turmoil domestic and military is depicted in his later years as a "small man with twinkling eyes and shaggy grey hair, often wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold." He became a "familiar sight, wandering the lanes of Cookham pushing the old pram in which he carried his canvas and easel." The pram, black and battered, has somehow survived, to become the most curious exhibit in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, which is dedicated to its owner's life and works.

When a member of a 1954 British Council delegation to China, Spencer is said to have introduced himself to Premier Zhou Enlai with the words, "Hello, I'm Stanley from Cookham." He further stated: "I feel at home in China because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near.’

Spencer was knighted in 1959. He died of cancer at nearby Cliveden later that year.

Art

The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery

Spencer has been described as an early modernist painter. His works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he envisioned and depicted in Cookham. Very evident in these too is the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents. His quirky romantic and sexual obsessions were also expressed within this home environment, but it is a mistake to regard him merely as some sort of quaint village innocent, inextricably tied to small-town England. His works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistic and experimental, whilst the nudes that arose through the futile relationship with Patricia Preece, such as the Leg of mutton nude, foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud, who expressed admiration for Spencer.

Spencer's early work is regarded as a synthesis of French Post-Impressionism, exemplified for instance by Paul Gauguin, plus early Italian painting typified by Giotto. This was a conscious choice, and Spencer was a key member of a group who called themselves the "Neo-Primitives." Allied with him were David Bomberg, William Roberts and other young contemporaries at the Slade.

His most ambitious work was the consequence of his Great War experiences: a cycle of 19 wall paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel (see above), which took five years to complete. During the Second World War, he was recruited by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to help in the war effort by recording activities that were taking place on the home front. Spencer chose to paint Clyde shipbuilders at work; when the war ended, he was in the process of planning a three-tier frieze 70 feet long representing their work.

Today, works such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), clearly set in the village and with actual residents taking part, rarely come up for auction, but when they do, they sell for immense sums. However, during Spencer's lifetime, it was his landscapes that were in demand. His dealer would press him to produce more, but Spencer expressed impatience, and professed that they were a chore. Nevertheless these landscapes of Cookham and its environs are still favored by many of the public.

Spencer made only three lithographs, all under the guidance of Henry Trivick.

Chronology of Spencer's Life

Unless otherwise noted, this concise chronology is based on information from the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham: †

• 1891 Born 30 June, in 'Fernlea', High Street, Cookham.
• 1907 Studied art, Maidenhead Technical Institute.
• 1908-12 Student at the Slade School of Art; contemporaries included Nevinson, Roberts, Gertler, Bomberg & Paul Nash. Nicknamed 'Cookham'. Awarded scholarship, Melville Nettleship & Composition Prizes.
• 1912 Exhibited in Roger Fry's 'Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition'.
• 1915-18 Enlisted RAMC, 1915. Stationed Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol. Posted to Macedonia, 1916. Volunteered for infantry, 1917.
• 1919 Official war picture, Travoys with Wounded Soldiers. Imperial War Museum.
• Also 1919, Spencer meets Hilda Carline.
• 1920 'The Last Supper' Stanley Spencer Gallery.
• 1925 Married the artist Hilda Carline; 23 February, two daughters, Shirin & Unity.Shirin is born in November 1925
• 1927 First one-man exhibition, Goupil Gallery. Created a stir with 'The Resurrection, Cookham', 1924-6 Tate Britain.
• 1927-32 Mural decorations based on wartime experiences in Bristol & Macedonia, Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere National Trust.
• 1929 Meets Patricia Preece
• 1930 Unity born in May
• 1932-38 Lived in Cookham. 1932 elected Associate of the Royal Academy.
• 1935 Resigned from RA after rejection of two paintings by hanging committee.
• 1937 Divorced by Hilda.
• 1937 Married Patricia Preece 29 May, but separated almost immediately.
• 1939-1941 Stayed and worked at The White Hart Inn, Leonard Stanley, Gloucestershire with George and Daphne Charlton. Started "Ship Building on the Clyde" series here.
• 1940 Commissioned to record the war effort by War Artists Advisory Committee: finished 'Shipbuilding on the Clyde' series, 1946.
• 1945-50 Port Glasgow Resurrection series.
• 1945-59 Lived at Cliveden View, Cookham Rise.
• 1950 Awarded CBE; rejoined Royal Academy & elected RA. Hilda dies in November.
• 1955 Retrospective exhibition, Tate Gallery.
• 1959 Returned to 'Fernlea'. Knighted. Died 14 December at Canadian Memorial Hospital, Cliveden, Berkshire.

Legacy

In November 2006, the Imperial War Museum asked Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson to lead a campaign to fund restoration of Spencer's paintings of Port Glasgow's shipyards in wartime and certain other works. Ferguson, whose father, brother and an uncle were working in the yards while the artist was there, took up the challenge.

Spencer's house near Cookham Rise Primary school is still in private occupation. The village's Methodist Chapel where the artist worshipped is today the Stanley Spencer Gallery. It mounts two exhibitions a year and holds over 100 items of his work.

Memorial

Spencer was cremated and his ashes laid in Cookham Churchyard, beside the path through to Bellrope Meadow. A discreet marble memorial marks the spot.

Further reading

• Anthony d'Offay (Firm), Stanley Spencer, and Hilda Spencer. Stanley and Hilda Spencer. London: Anthony d'Offay, 1978.
• Art: Stanley Spencer, Eccentric. Newsweek. 130, no. 20: 92. 1997
• Bell, Keith, and Stanley Spencer. Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. London: Phaidon Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8109-3836-7
• Glew, Adrian. Stanley Spencer Letters and Writings. London: Tate Publishing, 2001. ISBN 1-85437-350-1
• Gough, Paul. A Terrible Beauty’: British Artists in the First World War. Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2010. ISBN 1-906593-00-0
• Hauser, Kitty, and Stanley Spencer. Stanley Spencer. British artists. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-09024-6
• Pople, Kenneth. Stanley Spencer: A Biography. London: Collins, 1991. ISBN 0-00-215320-3
• Robinson, Duncan. Stanley Spencer. Oxford: Phaidon, 1990. ISBN 0-7148-2616-2
• Shepherd, Rosemary. Stanley Spencer and Women. [S.l.]: Ardent Art Publications, 2001.
• Spencer, G. Stanley Spencer, by his brother Gilbert - Illustrated by the author. London : Victor Gollancz, 1961.
• Spencer, Stanley. A Guided Walk Round Stanley Spencer's Cookham. [Cookham?]: Estate of Stanley Spencer,1994.
• Spencer, Stanley, and Fiona MacCarthy. Stanley Spencer: An English Vision. [New Haven, Conn.]: Yale University Press in association with the British Council and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1997. ISBN 0-300-07426-3
• Spencer, Stanley, and Gilbert Spencer. Gilbert and Stanley Spencer in Cookham: An Exhibition at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham 14 May – 31 August 1988. Cookham: Stanley Spencer Gallery, 1988.
• Spencer, Stanley, and John Rothenstein. Stanley Spencer, the Man: Correspondence and Reminiscences. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8214-0431-8
• Thomas, Alison, and Timothy Wilcox. The Art of Hilda Carline: Mrs. Stanley Spencer. London: Usher Gallery, 1999. ISBN 0-85331-776-3

External links

• Stanley Spencer Gallery
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Sandham Memorial Chapel
• Art and Vision of Stanley Spencer
• Berkshire History biography
• Tate Gallery
• Artcyclopedia
• Love, Desire, Faith: Kendal exhibition, 2002
• 251 Spencer images
• Stanley at the National Portrait Gellery
• Stanley in Leonard Stanley Gloucestershire - Stonehouse History Group