Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer was born in the Berkshire village of Cookham. He studied at the Slade (1908/12), and was already recognised as a highly gifted and original painter by the time of the First World War in which he served both with the Royal Medical Corps and with the Berkshire Royal Infantry. Though Spencer was horrified by his experiences at the front, the war served only to confirm the necessity for faith that manifests itself so strongly in his early work. In his war paintings, surgeons with symbolic red crosses bring faith and hope to the wounded. His cycle of murals for the Burghclere Chapel (1923/32) emphasized not the horror and violence of the trenches, but the daily routine of a soldier's life, their commonplace actions imbued with a holy importance and generating a sense of security. The foundations of Spencer's deeply personal religious conviction, were to be found in Cookham, the village where he was born, and which was to provide the main subject matter of his paintings throughout his career. For Spencer, the simple village was 'a holy suburb of Heaven', where God was a living and breathing reality. In his paintings, Spencer translated biblical scenes into a Cookham setting. The Nativity takes place in a local corner, Christ carries his cross down the high street and dustman returning to their wives at the end of the day, become a symbol of the resurrection. The monumentality and naive passion of Spencer's style recall the artists of the early Renaissance, fused through Spencer's unique child-like vision. As well as his narrative pictures, Spencer produced a number of landscapes, inspired by the Cookham countryside, and the local village gardens. During the 1930s, Spencer painted a series called 'The Beatitudes of Love', a celebration of his joy in faith and in sex, which he considered inseparable, a belief partly formulated by his experiences at the Front.
'During the war', he explained, 'I felt that the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual love.' His paintings are stark and uncompromising. The old are coupled with the young. Aged bodies are laid out in their nakedness, exposing the indignities of sagging forms and mottled skin. The same clear-sighted vision is employed in Spencer's portraits, remarkable close-up paintings, exploring the realities of the flesh. In the Second World War, Spencer was commissioned to paint the shipyards at Glasgow, after which he returned to his beloved Cookham, where he died in 1959.
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