Spencer’s Earthly Paradise

Stanley Spencer Gallery - 50^th Anniversary Exhibition

This exhibition is being held to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham. The gallery opened on 7 April 1962, less than three years after the artist’s death. It is fitting it should be housed in the former Wesleyan chapel, where Spencer as a child worshipped with his mother. In discussing the inspiration behind his work, the artist commented, ‘When I left the Slade and went back to Cookham I entered a kind of earthly paradise.’ This dual vision of the spiritual and the temporal was nourished by the village of his birth in which he spent much of his working life.

Built in 1846, the chapel has been described as a ‘simple Gothic structure for sheep gone astray.’ One of the Spencer drawings in the show, Ecstasy in a Wesleyan Chapel, recalls his youthful attendance and the particular spot which ‘seemed to be the “take off” place for their Methodist heaven’. After the chapel moved to Cookham Rise in 1910, the building was purchased by a local landowner, Colonel Ricardo (a probable source for Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), who philanthropically converted it into the King’s Hall Reading and Recreation Room, and used as such by inhabitants ‘over sixteen years of age’ between the wars. After Spencer’s death in 1959, it was felt there should be a memorial to him, and in 1961 a charitable trust, The Sir Stanley Spencer Memorial Trust, run by volunteers, was formed. The Viscount Astor, one of the Trustees, financed the building’s conversion into a gallery. After serving for over forty years, it was refurbished with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other generous donations, 2006-7, and is now an elegant modern art gallery which fulfils the inspiration of its founders. The history of the gallery and its collection is touched on in the catalogue.

For this anniversary exhibition, we highlight our own collection, together with short and long-term loans. There are over 50 works in the show. Grouped at the start is a series of self-portraits encompassing his entire career. These powerful self-images range from his dramatic first Self-Portrait in oils of 1914 (purchased by an early patron for £18) to his final Self-Portrait of 1959 when he knew he was dying (both lent by Tate). St Francis and the Birds 1935 (also lent by Tate) was one of two works rejected by the hanging committee of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1935, when The Scarecrow was accepted. Here they hang side by side. Spencer’s rejection led to his furious resignation from the RA and a consequent storm in the press. Domestic Scenes: At the Chest of Drawers, 1936, painted the following year, was deliberately less controversial, and provides an insight into his relationship with his first wife Hilda Carline. The Astor Scrapbook drawings feature other women: Elsie Munday the Spencers’ maid, Patricia Preece his second wife and Daphne Charlton with whom he had an affair.

Many of the artist’s religious and subject pictures, as well as landscapes, were set in Cookham. These include two important works from the collection: The Last Supper, 1920, set in a Cookham malt-house, and Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors, 1933. Here Spencer, as so often, interwove memory, religion and Cookham: in 1910 the tail of Halley’s Comet created an exceptional sunset which so frightened ‘Granny’ Tubb that she feared the end of the world had come and knelt in Cookham High Street to pray. This latter painting belongs to the Barbara Karmel Bequest which in 1995 significantly augmented the gallery’s collection. Also on loan from Tate is Mending Cowls, Cookham, 1915: the cowls, ‘great white moths’, had entered his imagination in childhood. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, 1952-9, his final masterpiece, which he did not live to complete, is on long-term loan to the gallery. A blend of the biblical with secular jollity it recalls from his youth the golden age of the Thames regatta.

The role of Lord Astor as Spencer’s friend and patron is commemorated in the Portrait of The Viscount Astor, 1956, for which the artist set up his easel at nearby Cliveden. Spencer was a frequent dinner guest and the Astor children were amused to notice he wore pyjamas under his dinner jacket (it speeded the ritual of going to bed). Shown in the gallery for the first time is a tapestry, Chestnuts, 1949, made by The Edinburgh Tapestry Company (Dovecot Studios), which commissioned works from a number of contemporary artists. The only tapestry made from a Spencer design, it stems ultimately from Chestnuts, one of the Astor Scrapbook drawings in the exhibition.   

The exhibition is accompanied by a 64 page catalogue (with 38 colour reproductions and 3 black & white illustrations) written by Carolyn Leder which is available from the Gallery at a cost of £5.

Dates

4 February – 4 November 2012

Winter Exhibition: 8 November 2012 – 24 March 2013.

The exhibition will continue with some changes to enable the display of further works from the gallery's collection.

Gallery Opening hours:

4 February - 31 March  Thursday - Sunday  11.00am – 4.30pm  

1 April – 4 November  Daily 10.30am – 5.30pm

8 November – 24 March  Thursday - Sunday  11.00am – 4.30pm