Stanley Spencer (Text Only)
Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959) has recently been recognised by a wide general public, as well as by art historians, as probably the greatest English painter of the twentieth century.His strange and thrilling settings of biblical and semi-biblical scenes, his grippingly realist portraits, his intense English landscapes, hang in pride of place in our national collections and fetch ever-escalating prices at auction. Although there have been many books about Spencer, Pople's biography is the first to give a thoroughly convincing and coherent account of the life and psyche of the man who produced these extraordinary pictures. Pople has not only had the co-operation of Spencer's daughters and remaining friends' he has had unrestricted access to the artist's letters, diaries and other writings, and has spent ten years unravelling the familiar but so often impenetrable mysteries we see on the canvas. His analysis demonstrates that there never was as artist for whom life and art were so much of a piece, and that without understanding Spencer's doings and circumstances, we have no hope of understanding his paintings.
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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1991
This edition published in paperback 1996
Copyright © Kenneth Pople 1991
Kenneth Pople asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780002556644
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193287
Version: 2016-06-07
CONTENTS
Part One: The Early Cookham Years 1891–1915
2 The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf
3 John Donne Arriving in Heaven
Part Two: The Confusions of War 1915–1918
11 The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels
12 The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown
13 The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze
14 The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze
15 The Burghclere Chapel: The 1917 summer panels
16 The Burghclere Chapel: The infantry panels
17 The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon
Part Three: The Years of Recovery 1919–1924
18 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
19 Travoys Arriving with Wounded Soldiers at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia
Part Four: The Great Resurrections 1924–1931
23 The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard
24 Burghclere: The Resurrection of Soldiers
Part Five: Return to Cookham 1932–1936
26 Portrait of Patricia Preece
Part Six: The Marital Disasters 1936–1939
33 Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece
Part Seven: Resurgence 1940–19
39 Village Life, Gloucestershire
40 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners
42 The Port Glasgow Resurrections: Reunion
43 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter
44 Christ Delivered to the People
Part Eight: The Reclaiming of Hilda 1951–1959
45 The Marriage at Cana: Bride and Bridegroom
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be
the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul
and of immortality. …
Walt Whitman: Starting from Paumanock
I often think I would enjoy writing more if it were not dependent on thoughts logically following each other. But I think this limits the capacity of thought and cuts it off from something which in its undisturbed condition it can deal with and perform.
Stanley Spencer>1
IN 1938, some of Spencer’s friends and associates urged him to assemble his thoughts into an autobiography. They included his dealer Dudley Tooth, the newly appointed director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, whose wife had been, as Ruth Lowy, one of Spencer’s fellow-students at the Slade and an early patron.
Their intention was to help him. His personal life was in shreds, his finances in disarray, his time largely devoted to saleable but ‘pot-boiling’ landscapes, his hallowed visionary work misunderstood and largely rejected. A judicious autobiography in which he could explain his ideas and motives might, it was felt, restore his prestige.
Spencer’s first reaction was one of caution. If, he argued, the public already found much of his visionary work ‘funny’, would they not find his explanations more so? Then suddenly he became enthusiastic. He would indeed write an autobiography. But it would not be assembled in the normal chronological arrangement. It would be a leisurely ‘stroll’ through his life, with pauses, diversions and retraces as the mood took him, a putting down on paper of the events, thoughts and feelings of his entire life to date. Nothing would be omitted. But neither would anything be stressed. The reader, making the journey with him, would be free to find the clues to his life, thinking and art, as Spencer himself had, often in strange and unexpected places.
