Stanley Spencer: Painter and Mystic

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 419, 4 July 1947, Page 10

Stanley Spencer: Painter and Mystic

N any gallery of painting a canvas by Stanley Spencer will arrest the attention and capture and . absorb the interest. There is a simple sincerity in all his work that seems to restore to the beholder ~ the unprejudiced, uninterrupted, single-eyed vision of early childhood. Obscured by no romantic mist, distorted by no intellectual theory of art or reaching after mere novelty, Stanley Spencer's paint+4 achieves its remarkable originality by a curious admixture of humdrum truth and apocalyptic vision.

Th. estimate of the artist and his work is by

IRIS

CONLAY

, art critic of the "London Catholic Herald"

and is made available to us by the British Council.

and foremost a painter of ideas: religious ideas. Britain has an important tradition of religious painters which began with the medieval muralists and was continued even through the iconoclastic period of the 17th Century Reformation, emerging again in Blake, BurneJones and, in our time, Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer. All these painters were strong individualists, whose vision sometimes led them into strange expressions. Spencer is no less an individual than his forebears, and if Christ once walked the waters of Galilee it does not seem unlikely to Spencer that He might also walk upon the waters of the 20th Century Thames. And so in a village churchyard, typical of thousands over England, Spencer sets his Last Judgment; in a farmyard of Berkshire the cocks, the hens and the ducks and the geese listen to St.- Francis’s sermon; Christ carries His cross past a manor-house in any shire; Zacharias and Elizabeth farm the green and pleasant land of Britain, and a heavenly Jerusalem is built at Cookham on the river Thames. Product of His Environment Cookham, the little riverside village where Spencer was born, is of immense importance in the story of the artist. He loved it, and it dictated terms to the artist, moulding him to a certain pattern, that of the village craftsman with a sure hand, a direct mind, and a simple faith. That is how Stanley Spencer matured just before the first world war; meticulous, hardworking, deeply religious and fundamentally secure. He had a trade, he had a family life, he had a religion, fore SPENCER is first

and all seemed permanent, satisfying and complete. He was one of the youngest of 11 children, and his parents were blissfully without worldly ambition. His father read the Bible out aloud to his children nightly and played quartets with his elder sons, so that Stanley from babyhood absorbed Bach and Beethoven. It was not, then, surprising that one day when Stanley had followed his big brother to church and heard him play a Bach prelude on the organ, he should tell his brother that "it was like angels shrieking with joy."

At 17, his father asked Stanley what he would like to do with his life. The boy answered that he would like to be an artist and his father seems to have raised no objection, despite the fact that his son had shown no sign of artistic inclination up to that time. He himself was a builder, and he believed that as he had learnt his\ trade laboriously and plied it with initiative, so too would Stanley apply himself to his trade of painting. Stanley did. He went first to a school of art at Windsor and afterwards to the Slade School in London. He trayelled to London every morning by train, returning home in time for tea in the evening, but never altered his clothes or his habits or his attitude of mind to suit the current town fashion. The Slade taught him technique but it never taught him style, nor gave him ideas. He looked physically like a child and he saw things from the angle of a child (from below looking up, as it were) but his thoughts were adult even at 18, and his work absolute and mature. His Method of Working He left the Slade and remained at home painting those peculiarly detailed landscapes of his beloved Cookham, in which every blade of grass and every leaf is carefully delineated. A few por- « = Le -7 traits, including a_ brilliant nd_alsoY) trait, belong to this period; and several religious pictures with the cornfields and river country as backgrounds. Years later he described his method of working at this time: | . I remained looking out of the big at the yew tree and then turning to Sydney, ask him to play some of the Preludes. He does so, though haltingly, yet with true understanding. And now for two or three (continued on next page) i

> (continued from previous page) hours of meditation. I go upstairs to my room and sit down at the table by the window and think about the Resurrection, then I get my big Bible out and read the book of Tobit, the gentle evening breezes coming through the open window slightly lift the heavy pages. I will go out for a walk through Cookham churchyard. I will walk along the path that runs under the hedge. I do so, and pause to look at a tombstone which rises out of the midst of a small privet hedge which grows over the grave and is railed around with iron railings. I return to our house and put it down on paper. I go to supper, not over-satisfied with the evening’s thought, but I know that to-morrow will. see the light, tomorrow ‘in my flesh I shall see God’ . After two or three hours’ reading I blow out the candle, and whisper a word to myself, ‘to-morrow’ I say and fall asleep . . . . I do not remember the exact moment of waking up, any more than I know when sleep comes, but although the moment of waking is not known, yet the moment when you be‘come aware that it is morning; when you say ‘it’s morning’ is the most wide awake moment of the day. How everything seems fresh and to belong definitely to the morning. . .. I go and call Gil in the little bedroom. I go downstairs . and out into the street and call a friend; we all go down to Odney weir for a bathe and swim. I feel fresh, awake, and alive; this is the time for visitation .... I swim right in the pathway of the sunlight; I go home thinking of the beautiful wholeness -of the day. During the morning I am visited and walk about in that visitation. Now at this time everything seems more definite and to put a new meaning and freshness you never noticed. In the afternoon _I set out my work and begin the picture. I leave off at dusk feeling delighted with the spiritual work I have done." This is probably a description of the beginning of Spencer’s most famous picture, The Resurrection, finished only in 1926 and now in the Tate Gallery, London. The Resurrection is a tumultuous canvas of crowded graves in a country churchyard, which are yielding up their dead. The naked figure of the artist himself rises from a tomb in the centre of the picture, and behind him, across the Thames, a boat is shown bringing souls from the land a death to the banks of life. Change of Direction And between the painting of the Resurrection and the idyllic. simple life which produced a Nativity, Elizabeth and Zacharias, the Apple Gatherers and many Berkshire landscapes, the first world war imposed itself. Spencer was sent out East, and in Macedonia the simple life became a distant myth. He did not have any opportunity to paint while there, but his visual memory stored impressions, and the direction of his life was altered. When he returned to Cookham he was not the singleminded, sure, and instinctive artist he used to be. The confusion of the times invaded him, and his work took on a new restlessness and a tension which is not yet relaxed. Directly from the war years resulted the great series of Burghclere murals called The Resurrection of Soldiers. Here, on the walls of a memorial chapel, Spencer has portrayed war, the horror and the glory and also the muddle and the boredom of it. Over the altar is his masterpiece, the magnificent vision of the soldiers, who grasping the cross,

know in the fullness of revelation that through death and suffering they have triumphed. Between the wars Spencer has been prolific. His flower studies and his landscapes, still in the main of Cookham, have piled up. But a new medievalism has emerged from his work. A spirit of the gargoyle is haunting the artist of Sunflower and Dog Worship, The Adoration of Old Men and The Adoration of Young Girls. The angelic vision of the early years has changed, and the evil, cruelty, and perversity that is evident in our times could not but affect such a perceptive imagination. During the last world war Spencer was commissioned to paint ship-build-ing’ on the Clyde. He took himself to the yards, lived with the men, became as one of them, shared their work, and in several brilliantly decorative panels he has portrayed the workers as beetlelike figures in an underworld of their own. Himself, he has painted into the scene sitting bewildered among the riveters like the child he still is in a world that he finds, day-by-day, less ee hensible. ceeeninertaieeeemes