Stanley Spencer
gigatos | May 31, 2022
Summary
Stanley Spencer (Cookham, June 30, 1891 – Cliveden, December 14, 1959) was a British painter, Spencer was especially skilled at composing cycles of paintings, such as his large work for the ”Sandham Memorial Chapel” and the ”Shipbuilding on the Clyde” series. The former is a World War I memorial, while the latter was commissioned by the ”War Artists” Advisory Committee” during World War II. In 1958 he was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
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Youth
Stanley Spencer, was the son of William Spencer, a music teacher and church organist, and Anna Caroline Slack. He was born in Cookham, Berkshire, on June 30, 1891, and was the seventh of eleven children, two of whom died in infancy. The family lived in a mansion they owned, called “Fernlea,” which had been built by Stanley”s grandfather, a master mason.
Between 1908 and 1912 he studied at the “Slade School of Fine Art” at University College London. Concurrently with Spencer were students at the Slade School, Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg, David Bomberg and Christopher R.W. Nevinson.Spencer”s skill as an artist was already evident in his early works, so much so that one of his teachers, Henry Tonks claimed that Spencer had the most original mind of any student he had had the pleasure of teaching.While a student he participated in the short-lived group of “Neo-primitives,” centered on David Bomberg He won several awards, including the Slade School”s “Slade Composition Prize” with the work “The Nativity” (1912). Three of his works were included in the 1912 exhibition on ”Second Post-Impressionism” organized in London by Roger Fry.
Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Fine Art, Spencer became known for his early paintings depicting biblical scenes set in Cookham, the small village on the banks of the Thames where he was born and where he spent much of his life. The artist referred to Cookham as “a village in Paradise,” and, in his biblical scenes, the villagers were depicted as gospel characters.
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World War I
At the outbreak of World War I, Spencer joined the ”Royal Army Medical Corps”(RAMC) as a volunteer. In 1915 he was employed at ”Beaufort Hospital” in Bristol, where he helped treat wounded soldiers on the Western Front. In August 1916 he was sent to Macedonia with the 68th Ambulance Unit. In 1917 he volunteered for infantry duty, joining the 7th Battalion ”Royal Berkshires” with which he spent several months on the front lines. After two and a half years on the front, in Macedonia, he was discharged due to persistent bouts of malaria. He returned to England at the end of 1918 and also returned to his work as a painter, but the terrible wartime experiences, which marked his character forever, also created difficulties for him in painting, and this state of mind was evident in all his later work.
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The 1920s
In 1919 Spencer was asked to do a painting for the ”Hall of Remembrance.” The request was to make a painting of his experiences in Macedonia, and he painted “Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916,” now housed in the Imperial War Museum.In 1925 Spencer married Hilda Carline, a student at Slade School and sister of artists Richard and Sydney Carline. In November of that year his first daughter Shirin was born (a second daughter, Unity, would be born in 1930).
Between 1924 and 1926 Spencer, hosted by Henry Lamb in his Hampstead studio, painted “The Resurrection Cookham,” which was shown in February 1927 in an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. The ”Times” art critic called it “…the most important picture painted by an English artist in this century….as if a Pre-Raphaelite had mixed hands with a Cubist.” In the painting the people of Cookham and Hampstead, including the artist and his family members, come out of their graves and into the streets of Cookham, going to meet God. The exhibition was a great success and as many as thirty-nine paintings turned out to be sold, including “The Resurrection, Cookham,” which was purchased by Baron Lord Duveen, who later presented it to the Tate Gallery.
Soon after, Spencer was commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Behrend to create a series of paintings in memory of Mrs. Behrend”s brother Henry Willoughby Sandham, who died in the war. The decorative cycle of nineteen paintings inspired by scenes of everyday military life in World War I was included in the ”Sandham Memorial Chapel” in Burghclere, Hampshire.The chapel was made according to Spencer”s own instructions and was painted following as a model the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, frescoed by Giotto.
Spencer worked on this colossal cycle almost continuously between 1926 and 1932, living in a house next to the chapel with his wife and two daughters. The memory of the experiences of the war was the inspiration for the entire mural, especially for the painting “Resurrection of the Soldiers,” (1928-1929), the concluding centerpiece of the cycle, set outside the village of Kalinova, Macedonia and depicting dead soldiers re-emerging from their graves.In this regard Spencer stated, “I had buried so many people and seen so many bodies that I felt death could not be the end of everything.”
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The 1930s
After completing the ”Sandham Memorial Chapel,” Spencer returned to Cookham. During 1932 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited ten of his works at the Venice Biennale. In 1935 he submitted two works, Saint Francis and the Birds and The Dustman, to the Royal Academy to participate in the ”Royal Academy Summer Exhibition,” but both were rejected.
Between 1935 and 1936 he produced a series of nine paintings, known as “Domestic Scenes,” in which he depicted his domestic life with his wife Hilda. In fact, during this period Spencer had begun dating artist Patricia Preece, and his relationship with his wife was in deep crisis, so much so that in 1937 the two divorced. Spencer married Preece a week after the divorce, but the marriage was never consummated, because she was actually a lesbian and was having an affair with her friend Dorothy Hepworth.Between 1935 and 1936 Spencer painted a series of nudes of Preece, as well as a double nude portrait of himself and Patricia, “Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece,” now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1937 he painted a second double nude, “Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife,” better known as ”Leg of mutton nude” (“Leg of mutton nude”).
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The 1940s
As his career progressed, Spencer began to produce more and more paintings for commercial needs, especially landscapes.In the years leading up to World War II, he undertook a series of more than 100 pencil works, known as the “Scrapbook Drawings,” for some of which he was also charged with obscenity by the Royal Academy.
In 1940 he was again chosen by the ”War Artists” Advisory Committee”, WAAC as a war artist and was commissioned to paint workers at work in the Lithgows shipyard in Port Glasgow, on the River Clyde, Scotland. His experience in this blue-collar community was the inspiration for a new series of paintings depicting biblical themes embedded in daily life, including, most notably “The Resurrection: Port Glasgow (1947-1950).” Between 1940 and 1946 he painted a series of eight canvases, of the thirteen originally planned, some as long as six meters. The series, called “Shipbuilding on the Clyde,” is currently in the Imperial War Museum.
In September 1945 Spencer returned to his hometown, settling with his brother Percy.
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The last few years
His former wife, Hilda Carline, died of breast cancer in 1950. Devastated by the news Spencer continued to write her long, frantic and erotic letters, often incoherent.In the spring of 1954, the Chinese government invited several Western delegations to visit China for the fifth anniversary of the ” 1949 revolution.” Included among the members of the British cultural delegation was Stanley Spencer, who was fascinated by the eastern country, among other things.In the following years he set his hand to a new cycle, “Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta” (1955-1959), which he worked on until his death, but failed to complete.
In 1958 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Southampton.In July 1959 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, becoming Sir Stanley Spencer.Five months later, on December 14, 1959, Stanley Spencer died of cancer in the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Cliveden. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Cookham in front of the churchyard, at the spot where a stone memorial was later placed. The memorial phrase inscribed on the stone is, “To the memory of Stanley Spencer Kt. CBE RA, 1891-1959 and his wife Hilda, buried in Cookham Cemetery in 1950. Whoever loves is begotten of God and knows God: whoever does not love has not known God, for God is love.”
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The Spencer Archives and the Stanley Spencer Gallery
In 1973 the Tate Gallery acquired most of the Spencer family archives. These included notebooks, sketchbooks, and Stanley Spencer”s correspondence, including weekly letters he wrote to his sister Florence while stationed in Salonika during World War I and letters he wrote to his wife after his divorce.
Spencer was a prolific writer, and the archives also contain a great many notes relating to his paintings.Other correspondence, some of which dates back to World War I, is kept in the archives of the ”Stanley Spencer Gallery” in Cookham.
In his later years Spencer was seen as a “small man with sparkling eyes and shaggy gray hair.” He had become “a regular sight as he wandered the streets of Cookham pushing the old baby carriage in which he carried his canvases and easel.” The baby carriage, black and battered, survived to become the most curious exhibit in Cookham”s ”Stanley Spencer Gallery,” opened in 1962 and dedicated to the artist”s life and works.
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