After the death of his first wife Hilda in 1950, he continued with his redemptive narrative paintings set in local surroundings, including "Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta". Throughout this period Spencer was periodically returning to Epsom where Hilda and the children were living. See lots more Stanley Spencer paintings at Art UK. Copies still circulate. His second marriage, in 1937, was never consummated. Interestingly though, unity seems to give birth to division, for although the adult couple are bound together, the young girls and young boys turn their back upon one another, as though there is a lack of comprehension and involvement between the male and female characters of the next generation. ©2021 The Art Story Foundation. His mother, who had not even wanted him to go to school, was opposed to this and persuaded him to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. Unity Spencer: Portrait of Stanley Spencer – 1957 – Painting, Oil on canvas, 506mm x 607mm. Sex-obsessed, jam-sandwich-eating, and outside-pajama-wearing - Stanley Spencer was the archetypal English eccentric. His work on the Sandham Memorial Chapel from 1927 to 1932 had partly fulfilled a concept he had developed during WWI. By this time he had married and divorced artist and fellow Slade student Hilda Carlin, and was the father of two daughters. Self Portrait, 1914, Stanley Spencer print in 11 x 14 inch mount SUPERB. Nevinson. Stanley Spencer was one of the leading artists in England during the early 20th century. Art.com pay us small commissions based on any prints or paintings that you buy as a result of … His agent ensured that he received regular payment for his commission in Glasgow, despite Spencer's notorious refusal to sign any agreements. He had been engaged to Hilda for several years, always postponing the actual marriage day until 1925, and within four years had begun his lasting obsession with Preece. Spencer wrote in a letter to his wife Hilda: "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." Visitors to the show will be able to explore his unique love life and the effect the two women had on his work. Though Spencer employed realistic tones and colors, he often distorted forms and spatial planes to expressive ends, as seen in his The Resurrection, Cookham (1924–1927). [Internet]. Jun 1, 2014 - Sir Stanley Spencer War Artist Clydeside Shipyards The Church-House would fully develop his concept of Cookham as Heaven, with paintings expressing the transformational power of erotic love. The central couple, with their arms entwined, metamorphose to become a stable and rooted tree. Oil painting - Estate of Stanley Spencer 1919 Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 This muddy work, depicted in browns, blacks and ochres, shows men bringing wounded soldiers to a field hospital on stretchers. Sir Stanley Spencer, (born June 30, 1891, Cookham, Berkshire, England—died December 14, 1959, Taplow, Buckinghamshire), one of the leading painters in England between the World Wars. His bandaged arm is lit up in positivity against the otherwise dark background. Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Eventually, William Spencer obtained the patronage of Lord and Lady Boston to find a place for Stanley at the Maidenhead Technical Institute. From 1908 to 1912, Spencer painted and exhibited a number of works, in which some of his lifelong approaches and themes were already clearly defined. Spencer made precise observational work and engaged deeply with historical art. Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) explored fundamental issues of life with an urgency and persistence unique among British artists of his generation. One of these was with Daphne Charlton, wife of the artist George Charlton, with whom he went to stay after the inevitable disintegration of his relationship with Preece. Love is the essential power in the creation of art and love is not a talent. Stanley Spencer was an English, early modernist, painter and draughstman, mainly of ambitiously sized biblical works. The value of Spencer's paintings soared after a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980. He died on December 14th 1959 and his ashes were buried in Cookham Churchyard. £39.99 . War intervened, and he eventually returned to this work with difficulty after serving on the Eastern Front for over two years. This encouraged a revival of his religious themed work, strongly influenced by the visions of Donne, Blake and Bunyan. But Spencer's insistence on the importance of subject-matter separated him from those modernist painters who were his contemporaries in London and Paris. It is Stanley Spencer's masterpiece and is arguably one of the greatest modern British artistic schemes ever conceived." £88.35. It was painted after Spencer returned from the war, and recalled his experience working with the field ambulances. The image well professes the calm comfort of Spencer's childhood, anchored by the dual influence of his parents. ", "Knowing what to paint, gives me the appetite for painting. Spencer took the microcosm of his childhood village, Cookham in Berkshire, and explored its land and people in order to understand the macrocosm that is life, and the world, even to the extent of the heavens as well as the earth. £52.08 postage. The relationship was literally laid bare in "Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife" also known as the "Leg of mutton nude". The portrait puts Spencer's face alongside the great and the good in the history of art, while by contrast, hung humbly for years in the front bedroom of Fernlea, the Spencer family home in Cookham-on-Thames. List of works Featured works (10) All Artworks by Date 1→10 (273) All Artworks by Date 10→1 (273) All Artworks by Name (273) High resolution (1) Styles Neo-Romanticism (273) Series The Beatitudes of Love (7) Sandham Memorial Chapel (16) Shipbuilding on the Clyde (20) Port Glasgow Resurrection (7) Domestic … The Port Glasgow work is in many ways reminiscent of Spencer's war paintings. The theme of redemptive sex is also present, if ironically, in the series of controversial nude portraits of Spencer and his second wife Patricia Preece, which the artist produced in the 1930s. Cookham, the village which he loved and where he spent most of his life, becomes the location for extraordinary events; the dead are resurrected and mingle with angels and Biblical characters in an everyday fashion. It is an activity that dates back to medieval times. He was born in 1891 in the historic village of Cookham, which would play a pivotal role in his art. He wanted this work to be a scene of redemption. The Stanley Spencer Gallery is located in Cookham, Berkshire, and is dedicated to the life and work of Sir Stanley Spencer. Hauser adds: "The simplified forms and bold use of color of his early work have something in common with Gauguin in particular. Stanley Spencer: List of works - All Artworks by Date 1→10. He used an expressively distorted … He studied at the Slade School of Art, where his contemporaries included Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, David Bomberg and C.R.W. The paintings of camp life reflect a strong desire for order and the domestic, obsessions for the majority of soldiers who simply wanted to return to "Blighty", hearth and home. Stanley was the eighth of those that survived. It was a project that was never completed. Stanley Spencer Gallery As a reviewer in The Times observed in December 1932, the chapel was an 'imaginative interpretation of incidents which impressed the artist in the course of his daily duties, and their great merit – as a memorial – is that they do not go outside either his practical or his emotional experience as an individual.' It seems clear then that this painting is a family portrait. From this experience, he would return again and again to themes of death, sex, redemption and resurrection. The Guardian / Charting the trajectory of Spencer's painting career in depth, this original publication provides a comprehensive analysis of the artist's oeuvre. Although Spencer did not himself choose the subject - for it was specified that students of The Slade were to depict "Apple Gatherers" for their annual drawing competition - it does seem that, as is typical, the artist has infused an imagined scene with details from his own life. He also painted a self-portrait that was remarkable in its confident use of shade and colour. Lack of fulfilment, consummation or completion apply to both of his marriages. Click & Collect. His work is sometimes described as quintessentially English, yet his is often a distorted, even grotesque vision of rural and industrial Britain. The later portrait clearly shows that the artist has two very different eyes and in this sense makes the profound comment that personalities are multiple and indeed sometimes split. Author and Spencer fan Sîan Pattendon visited the 2008 Spencer exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Stanley Spencer Gallery (b Cookham, Berkshire, 30 June 1891; d Taplow, nr. Here everything and everyone was redeemed." Despite his divorce, his relationship with Hilda never really ended. However, the themes and approaches owe as much to English writers and painters with their focus on the local, the personal and an ability to portray both darkness and innocence simultaneously. However, he also developed a highly personal visual style. Accepting the commission, Spencer dismissed the suggested subject matter, opting instead to depict "'God in the bare real things, in a limber wagon, in ravines, in fouling mule lines." The work came about after Spencer was approached by the British War Memorials Committee to produce an image of a religious service at the front. As is commonplace for the artist, he expressed within an everyday earthly scene, a pantheistic connection between man, woman, nature, and fertility. Although this work owes something to European modernism, Spencer set himself apart at an early age. As an ongoing project, the painter designed and worked towards "Church House", intended (although never built) as an enclosed sacred space made up of various chapel dedicated to his lovers, Preece, Hilda Carline (his first wife), Elise Munday, Daphne Charlton, and Charlotte Murray all included. A highly eccentric and isolated figure, writers and art historians often brush quickly over Spencer's awkward and difficult work. On 6 June 2011 Sunflower and Dog Worship sold for £5.4m, beating a record of £4.7m set a few minutes earlier … He would return to her often, still craving the domesticity that was impossible in their relationship. He wrote the acclaimed centenary biography, Stanley Spencer, published by Collins in 1991 (to which this website is an updated supplement.) His art reflects an intensely Christian faith yet is like no orthodox or even nonconformist vision. Spencer's canvases are so complex and detailed that they resemble historical, Spencer's originality lay in his merging of the descriptively literal with the visionary and imaginative. August 11 2007, By Craig Brown / This allowed him to emphasise the narrative and mystical atmosphere of his subjects. Click & Collect. £18.95. There is dynamism in the composition, in the medics' movement and in the way the wounded travel upwards, towards the light of the operating theatre in a clear spiritual reference. It was nominated for the Whitbread Prize and went on to two paperback editions before going out of print in 1997. He had two principle interests; sex and biblical narrative and the two sit quite jarringly and unsettlingly - sometimes even creating a perverse or sinister tone - when married explicitly together. In "The Dustman", the dustman's beatified face as his wife lifts him into the air reflects both sexual and religious ecstasy, while his awestruck relatives and friends offer him a cabbage leaf, a teapot and a jam jar from the bin. The second was with Charlotte Murray, when he was working on his magnificent shipyard images in Port Glasgow from 1939 - 1945. Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) became an important figure in British art during the first half of the twentieth century. 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 River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. As an early work, the painting looks forward to themes that will recur throughout Spencer's career, and although loosely painted in the far ground, shows as well the tight and rigorous attention to detail of which he is capable in the foreground. June 6 2007, By Harriet Sherwood / Indeed, he did himself refer to the painting as "my first ambitious work and I have in it wished to say what life was". The misshapen and fantastic images he created have their own persuasive appeal, as though the artist viewed the world through a deformed yet illuminating lens and invited the observer to look through it too. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and … Having observed the dead and dying around him, he began to see sex as the answer, the response to death, literally and inspirationally. These was to be the Church-House, with a chapel devoted to Carline and also, later, his lovers. His art comments on religion, love, sexuality, fraternity and community. His daughters would recall him as a good and loving father, far from the eccentric figure that the press portrayed him in later life. The Resurrection; waking up fetched £770,000 at Christie's early in 1990, and in May of that year his Crucifixion (1958) fetched £1,320,000. Within the naive realism of this work, Spencer set a theme that would endure throughout his career, that of finding the spiritual in the everyday. The Guardian / In contrast to both marriages, this was an image of sublime harmony between the mundane and spiritual worlds. The Stanley Spencer’s Gallery’s Spring exhibition, Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer opened its … It could transform the everyday world into 'a sort of heaven'. However, in Spencer's case, personally obsessed with sex due to unsatisfactory relationships, and with religion etched on the mind having had daily Christian stories recited at home as a child, his depiction of such subjects come with added intensity. The Daily Mail / from Amazon Stanley Spencer was one of the most significant British artists of the inter-war period. As well as looking forward to art of the future, the influence of the Old Masters is incredibly clear in this work; the deep, dark background and the strongly modeled form is reminiscent of a work by Vermeer or Rembrandt. Though he painted a variety of subjects he is best known, and loved, for his paintings that fuse everyday life with religious themes. Spencer resigned from the Royal Academy. This picture-book rural community, the archetypal Thames-side village, also provided inspiration for the author of "The Wind in the Willows", Kenneth Grahame. Spencer was eventually sent to Macedonia, where he served both in a Field Ambulance unit and in the 7th Battalion, the Berkshire Regiment. Hand Signed Vintage Christmas Card inc Nativity Picture by Unity Spencer Stanley. Throughout his marriages, Spencer had painted and drawn explicit images in his notebooks. The portrait is testament both to the artist's skill and to his intense and determined character. © www.StanleySpencer.org 2020. Indeed, Spencer was inspired to paint the portrait after seeing a reproduction of a head of Christ, by Luini, an Italian Renaissance artist. He had two principle interests; sex and biblical narrative and the two sit quite jarringly and unsettlingly - sometimes even creating a perverse or sinister tone - when married explicitly together. Although Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art, he traveled home every evening to have dinner with his family and remained estranged from other influential artists of his day. His works concentrate on descriptive detail, incident and anecdote, which combined with his visionary and imaginative spiritualism … Picking fruits from the trees, the viewer is of course reminded of the literal Garden of Eden making thus Spencer's parents and the family that they create comparable to the first romantic union and the fruits that it bore, a metaphor for creation itself. Cookham, 14 Dec. 1959). March 25 2001, By Fiona MacCarthy / In his visionary paintings, he deliberately distorted scale and combined closely observed and imagined elements. "Stanley Spencer Artist Overview and Analysis". The dead grow from the ground like plants, pushing aside the wire and fallen crosses to reach out to one another. Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire, in 1891. His work is unflattering and completely human, devoid of pity, yet rich in compassion and redemption. When passing a cemetery one evening, Spencer had a sudden revelation that this was the hill of resurrection. Stanley Spencer was one of the leading figures in British art between the World Wars. As art historian Kitty Hauser said: "The world did not always please Spencer, or bend to his wishes, and in his art he sought to create a painted world that was not subject to the same laws as the real one. As a student, Spencer was a member of the Slade Sketch Club. £1.75 postage. Artist and … His comment, 'I am on the side of angels and of dirt' shows a self-awareness that he expressed through his artistic vision. January 7, 2017. Rejected by both Carline and Preece, who appropriated his house and left him with neither home nor income, he continued to work on the series known as "Christ in the Wilderness" while living in Gloucestershire close to George and Daphne Charlton. The Wives of Stanley Spencer are the subject of a new exhibition Love, Art, Loss at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire. The relationship with his wife and family during his relationship was represented in his 1927 portrait "Hilda, Unity and Dolls", in which Hilda's body language clearly expresses her feelings, while Spencer's daughter Unity gazes out of the image, creating the connection that cannot be cut between husband and wife. Preece was the long-term lover of artist Dorothy Hepworth, and she maintained this relationship throughout her marriage to Spencer. English painter, one of the most original figures in 20th-century British art. View from Cookham Bridge – 1936 – Painting, Oil on canvas, 787mm x 1016mm. Stanley Spencer was British painter known for his depictions of Christian themes in contemporary settings. On the battlefields of WWI, soldiers raised from the dead reach out to one another through barbed wire and barricades of fallen crosses. His studies at the Slade were finished by the time the first World War broke out, and Spencer wanted to enlist. The series is now an important Imperial War Museum exhibit. After the rapturous reception of "The Resurrection, Cookham", Spencer's 1935 exhibition works "Saint Francis and the Birds" and "The Dustman" ("The Lovers") were rejected by the Royal Academy. In 1950, this resulted in a cause célèbre when Sir Alfred Munnings, then president of the Royal Academy, obtained some of the images and prosecuted Spencer for obscenity. Kenneth Pople (1919-2008) studied the art and writings of Stanley Spencer for some thirty years. Cookham is famous for its Swan Upping ceremony, during which, in Spencer’s day, the Thames swans were caught and marked on the beak by officials of the Crown and the Vintners' and Dyers' Companies. While Spencer’s preoccupation with sexual imagery in the 1930’s alienated his colleagues, contemporary critics now see his work as a precursor to the late 20 th century revival of figure painting. In fact, the character of the saint was based on Spencer's own father and it is difficult today to see how this painting could have been described as so offensive. Stanley Spencer’s letters. Spencer's family was an unconventional one. Home did not always prove to be the domestic idyll for which they yearned. Framed. ", "A person is a place's fulfillment, as a place is a person's.". In the lower right corner of the frame a man walks away from the scene looking back at the hospital. Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. All prints, paintings and photos included in www.StanleySpencer.org are provided as an affiliate to Art.com who hold necessary permissions. He was profoundly affected by the experience of World War I, which shattered his insularity having previously only known the life of an idyllic childhood. During this period, he read Thoreau's Walden. In many of his works, particularly the original war paintings and those with an overtly religious theme, Spencer takes an odd, oblique perspective, as if hovering slightly above the participants, looking into the scene. In this phrase he once more joins the sense of the religious ("The Last Supper") with sexual yearning and redemption, along with a bleak and self-deprecating sense of humour that is sometimes overlooked in critiques of his work. Opened in 1962, it is housed within a former Wesleyan Chapel in the High Street, a few minutes’ walk from the house where Spencer was born and where he used to worship. It is uniquely his own, the product of his own unconventional upbringing and path through life. In fact, the word eccentric is frequently applied to the Spencers, William (also known as Par) and Anna Caroline Spencer and their numerous children. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with cancer. As well as his marriages, he is known to have had at least two other relationships. During WWI he was given a copy of Saint Augustine's, Revealing himself as a romantic (he admired the poetry of John Donne and. The scene shown was actually that of an old Greek church that had been converted into a temporary operating theater. Artwork page for ‘‘Man Goeth to his Long Home’’, Sir Stanley Spencer, 1911 on display at Tate Britain. His contemporaries called him "Cookham" because of his attachment to his home. The prompt for this drawing was from the biblical book of Ecclesiates, ‘Man Goeth to his long Home’. In the foreground of the painting are raw joints of meat; a leg of lamb and a lamb chop, "the uncooked supper", in Spencer's description. Sir Stanley Spencer, 'Riveters' from Shipbuilding on the Clyde (detail), 1941, Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum Stanley Spencer's Shipbuilding on the Clyde series represents, in the words of Stanley Spencer Gallery Curator Carolyn Leder, 'one of the most remarkable artistic records of the Second World War'. For Stanley Spencer, love was like imagination. Related Links . Religion, sex and war were topics he often painted. He was a master at creating large, heroic, and sprawling multi-figure compositions. The Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer is an exhibition focusing on Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece, the two wives of the renowned British artist. He was briefly part of the Slade group known as the Neo-Primitives. As such, his story overlaps, at least in part, with that of the Polish-French painter, Balthus, who also uprooted from stability by the war, made particularly erotically charged pictures. Although Spencer himself often stated that he was trying to create peace and redemption in his paintings, the affect on the viewer can often, paradoxically, be one of writhing dystopia. Was: £110.44. 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 River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. The Estate of Stanley Spencer and their presence hold all necessary copyrights and licences for all of his paintings and other works. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. Wounded being carried by mules Macedonia -1918-1919 – Pen and wash on paper, 492mm x 390mm Nevinson dubbed Spencer 'Cookham', after the artist's profound attachment to the Berkshire village of his birth which … Painted when the artist was still young, we can just about see here the marked difference between Spencer's left and right eye. In 1908 he went to the Slade School of Art in London to study among artists who would become luminaries of the twentieth century, including Paul Nash, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg. St Francis of Assisi came in for particular criticism, being viewed as little more than a caricature. The Times described it as "the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century". Other works are from the Stanley Spencer Gallery collection, private owners and other galleries. At this time some of his work was exhibited as Post-Impressionist and was considered to show the influence of early Italian artists such as Giotto. The doll, the archetypal gendered toy, is a reminder of the repetitive pattern of marriage, the established (and expected) role of the female in procreation. All Rights Reserved, Stanley Spencer: Art as a Mirror of Himself, Sex and spirituality: Stanley Spencer's 'visions' return to Cookham, Stanley Spencer's daughter, Unity, on life amid the most bizarre domestic soap opera in British art history, The painter who found heaven in hell: Loveable painter Stanley Spencer's autobiography reveals the depth of his artistic vision, Jon Snow visits 'Britain's Sistine Chapel' for Channel 4 News, Sister Wendy Beckett on Stanley Spencer's Self Portrait with Patricia Preece, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919). The family was comfortably off, but not rich enough to send Stanley to a private school, so he was educated at home by his sisters. This muddy work, depicted in browns, blacks and ochres, shows men bringing wounded soldiers to a field hospital on stretchers. Spencer had already stipulated that the "Leg of mutton nude" would never be exhibited in his lifetime. A highly eccentric and isolated figure, writers and art historians often brush quickly over Spencer's awkward and difficult work. Love reveals and more accurately describes the nature and meaning of things than any mere lecture on technique can do. Spencer's most enduring relationship was with the village of Cookham. Spencer was one of nine children and here there are nine children and a monumental parental couple at the center. 1950 Sir Stanley Spencer Artist Painter By Irving Penn Vintage Photogravure Art. There is a sense of awe, yet also once again the everyday is present in the images of floor cleaning, making beds, "Filling Tea Urns" and "Sorting and Moving Kit Bags". The village residents became the characters in his painting and the landscape the stage setting for his mysterious scenes; he therefore successfully deals with universal themes coming from a local starting point. By Professor Andrew Causey (February 4, 2014), By Sian Pattenden / In his twenties, just before the outbreak of war, Spencer began to paint this seasonal incidence of the bizarre within the regular rhythms of everyday rural life. And his psychologically intriguing paintings represent an extension of this weird and wonderful personality. During the complex period of his first marriage, divorce and remarriage, Spencer was becoming well-established as a painter. Highlights are Hilda Carline’s defiant early self-portrait (on loan from Tate), Spencer’s own portrait of Patricia Preece (on loan from Southampton City Art Gallery) and a rarely seen self-portrait from Patrica Preece’s partner Dorothy Hepworth. And Paris to Epsom where Hilda and the hope of savior against the dark. 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