Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was born in Cookham, Berkshire, the eighth surviving child of William and Anna Caroline Spencer. His father was a music teacher and church organist. Stanley's younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), also became a notable artist, known principally for his landscape paintings. Stanley Spencer was educated at home by his sisters. Gilbert and Stanley took drawing lessons from a local artist, Dorothy Bailey.
From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg.
The story of Zacharias and Elizabeth occurs at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. The priest Zacharias is visited by the Archangel Gabriel while he is making a sacrifice by burning incense in the Temple. Gabriel tells him that although his wife Elizabeth is too old to have children, she will bear a son given to her by God who will become John the Baptist.
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. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930.
In February 1927 Spencer held his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. The centre piece of the exhibition was The Resurrection, Cookham (See below) which received rave reviews in the British press. The Times' art critic described it as "the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century. ... What makes it so astonishing is the combination in it of careful detail with the modern freedom of form. It is as if a Pre-Raphaelite had shaken hands with a Cubist."
To the left of the church some of the resurrected are climbing over a stile, others are making their way to the river to board a Thames pleasure boat, others are simply inspecting their headstones. Spencer created the picture in the early years of his marriage to Carline and she appears three times in the picture. Overall, the Goupil exhibition was a great success with thirty-nine of the displayed paintings being sold. The Resurrection, Cookham was purchased by Lord Duveen, who presented it to the Tate. After the exhibition Spencer moved to Burghclere to begin work on the Sandham Memorial Chapel for the Behrends.
The sixteen paintings in the chapel are double hung on opposite walls akin to the progression of altarpieces in a Renaissance church nave. 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 which is followed by scenes of Macedonia. Spencer did not depict heroism and sacrifice, but rather in panels such as Scrubbing the Floor, Bedmaking, Filling Tea Urns and Sorting and Moving Kit Bags, the unremarkable everyday facts of daily life in camp or hospital and a sense of human companionship rarely found in civilian life as he remembered events from Beaufort, Macedonia and Tweseldown Camp. Such is the absence of violence in the panels, The Dugout panel was based on Spencer's thought of "how marvellous it would be if one morning, when we came out of our dug-outs, we found that somehow everything was peace and the war was no more." The scene, Map Reading offers a contrast to the dark earth of the hospital and military camps in the other panels and shows a company of soldiers resting by a roadside paying little attention to the only officer depicted among the hundreds of figures Spencer painted for the chapel. Bilberry bushes fill the background of the painting, making the scene appear green and Arcadian which seems to prefigure the paradise promised in the Resurrection of the Soldiers on the end, altar, wall. Spencer imagined the Resurrection of the Soldiers taking place outside the walled village of Kalinova in Macedonia with soldiers rising out of their graves and handing in identical white crosses to a Christ figure towards the top of the wall. Working on the Memorial Chapel has been described as a six-year process of remembrance and exorcism for Spencer and he explained the emphasis on the colossal resurrection scene, "I had buried so many people and saw so many bodies that I felt death could not be the end of everything."
While working at Burghclere, Spencer also undertook other small commissions including a series of five paintings, on the theme of Industry and Peace, for the Empire Marketing Board in 1929, which were not used, and a series of 24 pen-and-ink sketches for a 1927 Almanack. Much later in his life Spencer adapted seven of these sketches into paintings including The Dustbin, Cookham (See below).
In 1929 Spencer had met the artist Patricia Preece, and he soon became infatuated with her. Preece was a young fashion-conscious artist who had lived in Cookham since 1927 with her lesbian partner, the artist Dorothy Hepworth. In 1933 she first modelled for Spencer and when he visited Switzerland that summer, to paint landscapes, Preece joined him there.
Spencer made a return visit to Switzerland in 1935, and Patricia Preece (See above) travelled with him. When they returned to Cookham, Spencer's wife, Carline, moved to Hampstead, and his contact with his daughters became limited. Carline was growing increasingly despondent and hurt at Spencer's fixation with Preece. Between the middle of 1935 and 1936 Spencer painted a series of nine pictures, known as the Domestic Scenes in which he recalled, or re-imagined, life with Carline at home. While Spencer was painting these, Carline, as shown by her letters from the time, finally started divorce proceedings and a decree absolute was issued in May 1937.
In a futile attempt to be reconciled with Carline, Spencer went to stay with her in Hampstead for ten days. Her rejection of this approach is the basis of Hilda, Unity and Dolls (See above), which Spencer painted during that visit. During the winter of 1937, alone in Southwold, Suffolk, Spencer begin a series of paintings, The Beatitudes of Love, about ill-matched couples. These pictures, and others of often radical sexual imagery, were intended for cubicles in the Church-House where the visitor could "meditate on the sanctity and beauty of sex". When Sir Edward Marsh, Spencer's early patron, was shown these paintings his response was "Terrible, terrible Stanley!".
In October 1938 Spencer had to leave Cookham and moved to London, spending six weeks with John Rothenstein before moving to a bedsit in Swiss Cottage. There was now no realistic hope of reconciliation with Carline and he was already distanced from Preece, who had rented out Lindworth so effectively evicting Spencer. At this low point Spencer painted four of the canvases in the Christ in the Wilderness series. He originally intended to paint a series of 40, one representing each day of Jesus's sojourn in the wilderness, but in the end only eight were completed and a ninth was left unfinished. 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. While in Gloucestershire, Spencer also began a series of over 100 pencil works, now known as the Scrapbook Drawings, which he continued to add to for at least ten years.
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Since late in 1938, Spencer's agent, Dudley Tooth had been managing Spencer's finances and when the Second World War broke out he wrote to E.M.O'R. Dickey, the secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, seeking employment for Spencer. In May 1940 WAAC sent Spencer to the Lithgows Shipyard in Port Glasgow on the River Clyde to depict the civilians at work there. Spencer became fascinated by what he saw and sent WAAC proposals for a scheme involving up to sixty-four canvases displayed on all four sides of a room. WAAC agreed to a more modest series of up to eleven canvases, some of which would be up to six metres long. The first two of these, Burners and Caulkers were completed by the end of August 1940. WAAC purchased the three parts of Burners, but not Caulkers, for £300 and requested a further painting, Welders, for balance. Spencer delivered Welders in March 1941 and in May 1941 saw the two paintings hanging together for the first time at the WAAC exhibition in the National Gallery. WAAC held Spencer in the highest regard, and in particular Dickey ensured he received, almost, all the expenses and materials he requested and even accepted his refusal to fill-in any forms or sign a contract.
Between trips to Port Glasgow, Spencer was renting a room in Epsom, to be near Carline and his children, but the landlady there disliked him and he wanted to move back to Cookham and work on the paintings in his old studio but he could not afford to rent it from Preece, so WAAC agreed further financial help for that purpose. In May 1942, Spencer delivered Template, followed by twelve portraits of Clydesiders in October 1942. By June 1943 Spencer was having problems with the composition of the next painting in the series, Bending the Keel plate and considered abandoning it. Although he was not entirely happy with the painting, WAAC purchased it in October 1943 for 150 guineas. About this time, the owner of the shipyard, James Lithgow, complained to WAAC about Spencer's portrayal of his shipyard. WAAC duly commissioned Henry Rushbury to go to Port Glasgow and produce some rather more conventional views of shipbuilding for Lithgow. Spencer made further visits to Glasgow and by June 1944 had completed Riggers and begun work on Plumbers. After WAAC had purchased these two paintings, they did not have enough funds to authorise the completion of the entire original scheme of paintings. By the time WAAC was wound up, money had been made available for one further picture, The Furnaces, which would become the central piece of the scheme. After the war, when the WAAC collection of artworks was dispersed to different museums, the complete Shipbuilding on the Clyde series was offered to the National Maritime Museum who refused to accept the pictures and they were given to the Imperial War Museum instead.
Among the dressing stations 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 stretchers 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."
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