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Stanley Spencer (Text Only)
Ken Pople
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.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_8ad7564f-86ab-56c4-bcd0-7f5ac4eb96b3)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780002556644
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193287
Version: 2016-06-07
CONTENTS
Cover (#ucae07e0d-e8d7-5776-8b6a-78bc4d6ab20e)
Title Page (#ubf389518-9134-5009-aa2b-0edec629b892)
Copyright (#ulink_16f11d11-59df-57a6-b231-89475072a058)
Preamble (#ulink_89473b00-355b-5db9-b832-58e2f7fd950c)
Part One: The Early Cookham Years 1891–1915 (#ulink_b55a6d03-7cb1-5ef5-9c5f-d61f96d503e6)
1 The Coming of the Wise Men (#ulink_8ec092d6-8c3e-58df-a355-f12aca5663ea)
2 The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf (#ulink_8cc91cf0-ae49-594c-81c3-be52424b9544)
3 John Donne Arriving in Heaven (#ulink_5cbc2bc0-a98e-54fb-9f05-bffe090ae074)
4 Apple Gatherers (#ulink_34d5ae30-f0fb-5fbe-a3c2-0b8df3595e2a)
5 The Nativity (#ulink_33f167f4-1ffe-5393-b5e5-1e8f2ff44e7b)
6 Self-Portrait, 1914 (#ulink_df687cee-32da-5453-88cf-b937f2293d8a)
7 The Centurion’s Servant (#ulink_a9998496-2705-5ac3-b9e6-a7ac0b66d125)
8 Cookham, 1914 (#ulink_9d61a710-a396-5140-86f6-7a8e4b8535b1)
9 Swan Upping (#ulink_85cf4bb1-d29f-5939-b65b-6fbe9db882f6)
10 Christ Carrying the Cross (#ulink_e8363d34-528f-503e-a006-d77ea75333f9)
Part Two: The Confusions of War 1915–1918 (#ulink_fb8353cb-b30a-57c9-80c8-42b860b0d60e)
11 The Burghclere Chapel: The Beaufort panels (#ulink_f0b7a795-89ce-5ddb-99e2-4aeacfd56ffa)
12 The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown (#ulink_3b78c99c-883d-561a-a609-95520fb690d8)
13 The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze (#ulink_465dc39c-6fa1-5a3c-a9a4-17285eb9c042)
14 The Burghclere Chapel: The right-wall frieze (#ulink_beb04d55-1721-58a9-baeb-62ed1fef4d67)
15 The Burghclere Chapel: The 1917 summer panels (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The Burghclere Chapel: The infantry panels (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: The Years of Recovery 1919–1924 (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Travoys Arriving with Wounded Soldiers at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Last Supper (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Crucifixion, 1921 (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Betrayal, 1923 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four: The Great Resurrections 1924–1931 (#litres_trial_promo)
23 The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Burghclere: The Resurrection of Soldiers (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five: Return to Cookham 1932–1936 (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The Church of Me (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Portrait of Patricia Preece (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Dustman, or The Lovers (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Love on the Moor (#litres_trial_promo)
29 St Francis and the Birds (#litres_trial_promo)
30 By the River (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Love Among the Nations (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Bridesmaids at Cana (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Six: The Marital Disasters 1936–1939 (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Hilda, Unity and Dolls (#litres_trial_promo)
35 A Village in Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Adoration of Old Men (#litres_trial_promo)
37 The Beatitudes of Love (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Christ in the Wilderness (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Seven: Resurgence 1940–19 (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Village Life, Gloucestershire (#litres_trial_promo)
40 Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Burners (#litres_trial_promo)
41 The Scrapbook Drawings (#litres_trial_promo)
42 The Port Glasgow Resurrections: Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)
43 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter (#litres_trial_promo)
44 Christ Delivered to the People (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Eight: The Reclaiming of Hilda 1951–1959 (#litres_trial_promo)
45 The Marriage at Cana: Bride and Bridegroom (#litres_trial_promo)
46 The Crucifixion (#litres_trial_promo)
47 Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (#litres_trial_promo)
48 Envoi (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources and Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes and References (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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
Preamble (#ulink_0371adcc-b852-5c70-b1e2-74ed8e8e18bc)
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
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.
The promoters were aghast. Some editing, they urged, must be accepted: ‘You are being offered a chance that you would be absolutely crazy to turn down,’
fumed Dudley Tooth. Spencer remained unmoved: ‘I would rather a book on myself and my work were a confused heap and mass of matter from which much could be gathered than risk something of myself being left out in the interests of conciseness.’
The venture collapsed.
Spencer, despite the travail of his circumstances, was blithely unrepentant. The fact was that, seized by the idea, he had already started on the project in private and was to continue it for the rest of his days. There was no discernible pattern to his writings. He would compose extensive essays in thick notebooks, but equally make random jottings in scrapbooks, on drawings, on scraps of letters, on old envelopes, on anything to hand. He seldom kept letters but would draft replies, often unposted because having sorted out his thoughts in them they became more valuable to him in his own possession than in that of the intended recipient. Others were unsent because on reflection he felt their sentiments were too confessional or, in other moods, too accusatory. By the end of his life the writings totalled millions of words, heaped into several trunks into which he would dip to reread, reannotate, re-paginate, rearrange. ‘You can burn those,’ he told his brother Percy when he knew his time was measured. But by his death, in December of 1959, the matter had passed from Percy’s hands, and in any case Percy did not want the responsibility.
To read them now is a disturbing experience, for they are expressed with an intensity he would normally have denied the public gaze. They have been sieved by scholars for references to his paintings, but, interesting though these are, they offer little in the way of immediate illumination. Spencer knew this. They are written in a code, a language of his own which appears to be the language we also use, but is not. The language was born not of secrecy but from the impossibility all artists face, in whatever medium, of finding in the words or images or symbols they are given to use that universality their imagination perceives. In them his thoughts flow like a stream of consciousness, turning and twisting, so that the reader is soon lost in a tangle of developments and, if he or she can summon the will, must go back again and again to re-chart their course over even a few of the many thousands of pages. The surprise is that to each development there is invariably a beginning and an end; however many diversions Spencer took on the way, he usually knew both his direction and his destination. His imagery, bizarre and esoteric though it often seems, captures both the exuberance of his associations and the precision with which he externalized it in his art.
In venturing today into this study of Spencer’s life and art, boldness is offered; but it is boldness disciplined by the sense of the totality of his experience. An artistic interpretation which ignores Spencer’s material existence will remain truncated. Yet a biography which blinds itself to the revelation in his paintings of the facts of his existence can only perpetuate the superficiality which saw him – and sometimes sees him still – as whimsical or innocent or unworldy or even as blasphemer or pornographer. His oddities are, like the highly personal and visionary paintings he undertook, sudden flashes of lightning, often charged over long periods, which momentarily illuminate climaxes in a continuous procession in his mind, an inner pageant. The pageant overwhelmed him. To its service he dedicated both his art and his everyday existence. When he could reconcile them, he knew happiness. When they conflicted, he was torn. The demands of art invariably won, but the cost in material sacrifice could be cruelly high.
