The Singular Stanley Spencer

A day at the seaside: stripey deckchairs, a pebbly shore, groynes, choppy sea, swimwear and towels drying on a line and the edge of a brightly coloured beach hut. It's a very English scene. And look, even the sun is out. Surely everybody's having fun? 

Sadly, the painter -- a very English artist -- wasn't enjoying himself. Stanley Spencer had come back to Suffolk, a place where he'd previously known happiness, seeking solace after divorce from his first wife and the almost immediate breakdown of his second marriage. On the beach at Southwold, there was an air of "suburban seaside abandonment", he wrote in his notebook. But painting it, he was separated from the jollity by the high sea wall. "I felt a kindred feeling with the bathing suits in the line in front of me in the scene that they seemed to be taking no part, as I was not, with the activities on the beach." 

The tale is told and the painting can be seen in Suffolk now, at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, where we've come for Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk. We tend to associate Stanley largely with his home village of Cookham on the Thames in Berkshire, but this exhibition explains the role the East Anglian county played in his life. And it's a show whose storyline goes to emphasise just how odd a character Spencer was: a man with a singular mystic artistic vision but whose relationships with women were complicated, to say the least. 

Let's get back to the beginning. Stanley was introduced to Suffolk by his fiancée and fellow artist, Hilda Carline, whom he met shortly after World War I; she'd worked at Wangford, near Southwold, as a Land Girl. They returned to Wangford for extended painting holidays from 1924 to 1926. Among the first images you see in this show are self-portraits by Stanley and Hilda painted in 1923, when they were already in their early 30s. 

Here's Stanley looking a bit dreamy, and without those large round spectacles he'd wear in later years. Hilda looks really rather serious. Her paintbox is down by her side, front left, though that hat doesn't look the sort she'd be doing any work in. 

It was a turbulent relationship even before they were married. Stanley broke off the engagement, not for the first time, when he came across Hilda being fitted for her wedding dress, an episode he later recalled in the book illustration below. 

The vision was so disturbing that he insisted Hilda wear ordinary clothes for the ceremony, which finally took place in Wangford parish church in February 1925, with her in a rather sombre brown-and-black striped suit, which you can see on display. 

There had initially been an attraction between Hilda and Stanley's brother Gilbert, and indeed Gilbert joined them on their honeymoon -- in Wangford. Gilbert painted The Windmill in the village, while the following year Stanley immortalised The Red House, a curtain flapping from one of the upstairs windows. 

In both years, Stanley and Hilda stayed at The Hill, a house belonging to the Lambert family, and it was there he returned, alone, at his low ebb in 1937. A painting entitled Gardening from around 1945 shows Mr Lambert and his daughter digging up leeks, the textures and colours of their clothes and her trug blending in with the hues of the muddy vegetable plot. 

  

Stanley and Hilda's marriage was already under strain when he became infatuated in the early 1930s with Patricia Preece, whom he married in 1937 just days after getting a divorce from Hilda. But as we saw at Charleston in Lewes a couple of years ago, Stanley never went on honeymoon with Patricia; instead she went to Cornwall with her lover Dorothy Hepworth, whose paintings were signed and marketed as being Preece's. 

And with that in mind, the feeling we got in Sudbury was that the more you come across Spencer, the more singular he seems. Look at the biography on the website of the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham and you'll find him described as "a most sociable character who has often been called eccentric and Patricia in her diaries even called him 'mad'. As a character he was certainly different and unusual. The small man with twinkling eyes and shaggy grey hair (often wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold) became a familiar sight wandering the lanes of Cookham pushing the old pram in which he carried his canvas and easel.''

Spencer's most characteristic works are those showing Biblical scenes taking place as if in the Cookham of his imagination, with people of the village somehow taking the roles of those in the Holy Land. The Resurrection, Cookham in the Tate collection happens in Spencer's personal vision in Cookham churchyard, with Hilda and himself among the participants. There's an early study for it in this show. 

And there are also a number of pictures intended for an ambitious though completely impracticable project of Spencer's -- the Church-House, or Church of Me, intended to be a vast edifice covering Cookham and filled with paintings of Stanley's life and loves, indeed expressing his reverence for all sorts of love. They include domestic scenes such as one showing him (very small) and Hilda (much larger) choosing clothes At the Chest of Drawers, and a series depicting the Marriage at Cana, of course transposed to Cookham, with Girls Returning from a Bathe before they dress up for the celebrations. 

It's notable how oddly distorted the figures are in much of this work, grotesque almost. That's in sharp contrast to the precision of Spencer's landscapes. Left on his own and short of money, Stanley was encouraged by his dealer to paint landscapes, which were in greater demand than figure paintings. 

But here's a strange view of Cookham, with part of a tennis court taking up the foreground. We appear to be high up, at treetop level, and way above a rooftop on the right. Beyond, the countryside extends out across a flat plain with some trees and water before rising up to the distant hills. To add to the oddness are two branches with leaves right at the front of the picture protruding on to the lines of the court.

Spencer didn't actually like painting landscapes very much. He said that he felt "so lonely when I draw from nature". 

And let's end in Cookham, with a view of the Thames, a very English river: the crenellated church tower on the left, the country house, the walled garden, distant fields, the towpath and the boats on the water. But look too at all those delightful patterns: the horizontal boards of the boathouse and the lines of what appears to be its corrugated-iron roof, the ripples of the river and the regular stripes in the punts.  

We very much enjoyed this show; it's well worth a visit. 

Practicalities

Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk is on at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury until March 22. The museum is open daily from 1000 to 1630. Standard ticket prices are £16.50 including Gift Aid, £15 without. We spent just under an hour in this show, but you'll also want to explore the rest of the museum. There are a couple of other temporary exhibitions, featuring Humphrey Ocean and, rather more enticingly for us, the lush landscapes of Hannah Brown. There's also a collection of works by Thomas Gainsborough, a museum devoted to him, and a room of pictures by Cedric Morris. It's a considerably larger gallery than we were expecting....

Gainsborough's House is about 10 minutes walk from Sudbury train station; there's an hourly service from London Liverpool Street changing at Marks Tey and taking about 1 hour 20 minutes on weekdays, a little longer on Sundays. 

The Spencer in Suffolk exhibition will also be shown at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham from April 4 to November 1.  

Images

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Southwold, 1937, Aberdeen Art Gallery. © Estate of Stanley Spencer; Image provided by Aberdeen City Council (Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection)
Stanley Spencer, Self-Portrait, 1923, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. © Estate of Stanley Spencer
Hilda Carline (1889-1950), Self-Portrait, 1923, Tate. © Estate of Stanley Spencer. Photo: © Tate © Estate of Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer, Month of March: Dressmaking, 1926, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. © Estate of Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer, Study for the Resurrection, c. 1920-21, Private collection. © Estate of Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer, View from the Tennis Court, Cookham, 1938, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. © Estate of Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer, View from Cookham Bridge, 1936, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. © Estate of Stanley Spencer.