Sir Stanley Spencer (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Much of his greatest work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land, but in Cookham, the small village where he was born and spent most of his life; fellow-villagers frequently stand in for their Gospel counterparts, lending on occasion Christian teachings an eerie immediacy. He referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven."
Biography
Early life
Spencer was born and spent much of his life in the Thames-side village of Cookham in Berkshire. His father, William Spencer, was a music teacher. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), was a talented painter of landscapes.
From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art in 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.[1] 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.
War service
After a long period of agonising whether or not to join up, in 1915 Spencer volunteered with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital (which later became Glenside).[2] 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 transfered to the Berkshire Regiment. His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations come through time and again in his religious works.
Towards the end of the war he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to paint what became Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (now in the Imperial War Museum). It was visibly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. A further major commission was to paint murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere dedicated to the war dead. The altarpiece depicts the Resurrection of the Soldiers.
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.
Marriage & later years
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. Carline divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later he married the artist Patricia Preece, whom he had met in Cookham; she, however, was a lesbian. She continued to live with her partner, and though she frequently posed nude for her husband, she refused to consumate the marriage. When Spencer’s bizarre relationship with Patricia 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.[3]
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."[4]
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 British Council delegation to China not long before his death, Spencer is said to have introduced himself to Premier Zhou Enlai with the words, "Hello, I'm Stanley from Cookham."
Spencer was knighted in 1959. He died of cancer at nearby Cliveden later that year.
Art
The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7, oil on canvas, by Sir Stanley Spencer,
Tate Gallery
Spencer developed a naïve style, influenced in part by Giotto and the colourful primitivism of Paul Gauguin.
His most ambitious work was the consequence of his Great War travails: a cycle of 19 paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel (see above), which took five years to complete.
Spencer's earthy Christian faith and his preoccupation with death and resurrection are evident in much of his work.
Many paintings such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), set biblical scenes in the village and depict actual villagers as Biblical characters. Today such works, in the rare event that they come up for auction, sell for immense sums.
During Spencer's lifetime it was his landscapes that were in demand. His dealer would press him to turn out more. Many of his best landscapes are views of his beloved Cookham.[5]
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.[6]
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.
References
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 0810938367
- Glew, Adrian. Stanley Spencer Letters and Writings. London: Tate Publishing, 2001. ISBN 1854373501
- Hauser, Kitty, and Stanley Spencer. Stanley Spencer. British artists. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0691090246
- Haycock, David Boyd (2009). A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War. London, Old Street Publishing. ISBN 978-1-905847-84-6.
- MacCarthy,Fiona.Stanley Spencer , An English Vision Yale University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-300-07337-2
- Pople, Kenneth. Stanley Spencer: A Biography. London: Collins, 1991. ISBN 0002153203
- Robinson, Duncan. Stanley Spencer. Oxford: Phaidon, 1990. ISBN 0714826162
- Shepherd, Rosemary. Stanley Spencer and Women. [S.l.]: Ardent Art Publications, 2001.
- 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 0300074263
- 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 0821404318
- Thomas, Alison, and Timothy Wilcox. The Art of Hilda Carline: Mrs. Stanley Spencer. London: Usher Gallery, 1999. ISBN 0853317763
External links
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