Stanley Spencer: (1891-1959)

Sir Stanley Spencer NEAC KBE CBE RA (30 June 1891–14 December 1959) was elected a member of the New English Art Club in the 1920s and was one of the greatest artists of his generation, known for his complex realist but imaginative style.

Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. He referred to Cookham as ‘a village in Heaven’ and in his biblical scenes, fellow villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War.

As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid, he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Spencer's works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he based in Cookham which show the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents and also his romantic and sexual obsessions. Spencer's works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistic and experimental, while the nude works depicting his futile relationship with his second wife, Patricia Preece, such as the ‘Leg of mutton nude’, foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud. 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. 

Early life

Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire. He was educated at home by his sisters Annie and Florence, as his parents had reservations about the local council school but could not afford private education for him. Along with his brother Gilbert (who also went on to become a notable artist), he took drawing lessons from a local artist, Dorothy Bailey. He later attended Maidenhead Technical Institute where his father insisted he should not take any exams.

From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. 

First World War

At the start of the First World War Spencer was keen to enlist but his mother persuaded him, given his poor physique, to apply for ambulance duties. In 1915, he volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps, RAMC, and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol. He left Beaufort in May 1916 and after ten weeks' training at Tweseldown Camp in Hampshire, the 24-year-old Spencer was sent to Macedonia, with the 68th Field Ambulance unit. In 1917, he subsequently volunteered to be transferred to an infantry unit, the 7th Battalion, the Berkshire Regiment. In all, Spencer spent two and a half years on the front line in Macedonia, facing both German and Bulgarian troops. His survival of the war that killed so many of his fellows, including his elder brother Sydney, who died in action in September 1918, indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations came through time and again in his subsequent works.

1918-1932

Spencer returned to England at the end of 1918 and went back to his parents at Fernlea in Cookham, where he completed Swan Upping, the painting he had left unfinished when he enlisted. Swan Upping was first exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1920 and was bought by J. L. Behrend. 

In October 1923, Spencer started renting Henry Lamb's studio in Hampstead where he began work on ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’. In 1925, Spencer married Hilda Carline, a former student at the Slade and the sister of the artists Richard and Sydney Carline. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930.