Date/Time
Date(s) - 30/03/2019
2:30 pm - 4:45 pm
Categories
Bucks GT Spring Talk 2019 by Dr Gill Clarke
Stanley Spencer
2.30pm, Saturday 23 February 2019
at the Bucks County Museum
£12 for members, £14 for guests
Gardens in the Pound, Cookham, (1936) Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during the Second World War.
As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Spencer’s works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he based in Cookham which show the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents and also his romantic and sexual obsessions. Spencer’s works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistic and experimental, while the nude works depicting his futile relationship with his second wife, Patricia Preece, such as the Leg of mutton nude, foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud. Spencer’s early work is regarded as a synthesis of French Post-Impressionism, exemplified for instance by Paul Gauguin, plus early Italian painting typified by Giotto. In later life Spencer remained an independent artist and did not join any of the artistic movements of the period, although he did show three works at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912.
(article from wikipedia)
Stanley Spencer in the news!
Cookham from Englefield, Stanley Spencer
A stolen Sir Stanley Spencer painting worth £1m has been returned to its owners after it was found under a drug dealer’s bed. The valuable work, titled Cookham from Englefield, (above) was stolen from the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Berkshire, in 2012. It was missing for five years until detectives arrested Harry Fisher, 28, after they stopped a Mercedes in Strood, Kent, last June (2017), and found one kilogram of cocaine and £30,000 in cash. Officers later discovered the artwork next to three kilograms of cocaine and 15,000 ecstasy tablets under a bed during a raid of Fisher’s flat in Kingston-Upon-Thames, south west London.
You could not make it up!
Currently on exhibition at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham:
Spring Talk 2019
All our Talks are held at the Bucks County Museum
Church Street, Aylesbury, HP20 2QP
(our map shows you how to find the Museum and parking)
and include tea and cakes at the end.