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Room 1 I Room 2 I Room
3 I Room 4 I Room
5 I Room 6
Room 1: Innocence
Stanley
Spencer Apple Gatherers, 1912 -13
Tate, Presented by Sir Edward Marsh, 1946
© Estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved,
DACS 2001 |
Throughout the years in which he attended art school
in London (1908 - 12), Stanley Spencer travelled back
each evening to the Berkshire village of Cookham, to
the house he had grown up in and his large and gifted
family. To the young artist, Cookham was a kind of Eden
in which every detail of life was enfolded with Christian
meaning.
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Raised in a religious if not denominationally strict household,
by parents with connections to both Anglican church and Methodist
chapel, Spencer nevertheless proved immediately responsive
to the ferment of early modernist painting that he encountered
at the Slade. By 1909 he was attending Roger Fry's lectures,
reflected in the formalised design of John Donne Arriving
in Heaven 1911 (no.4). He probably saw Fry's first Post-Impressionist
exhibition and, in 1912, John Donne was included in
the second.
Since formal teaching at the Slade was restricted to drawing,
all Spencer's early paintings were completed in the corners
of sheds, barns and often-crowded rooms in Cookham. He was
by now part of a Slade grouping known as the Neo-Primitives,
alongside Mark Gertler, William Roberts and C.R.W. Nevinson
- each of whom were working towards creating a synthesis of
contemporary French and early Italian painting.
Stanley
Spencer Swan Upping, 1915-19
Tate © Estate of Stanley Spencer. All rights reserved,
DACS 2001 |
Already visible in The Nativity 1912 (no.7),
that sense of a mysterious world out of time and clothed
in grace, where every particular is touched with divinity,
was confirmed in Zacharias and Elizabeth (no.14),
set in a Cookham landscape of extraordinary intensity.
Spencer's compelling 1914 Self-Portrait (no.13)
established him as the most wide-ranging talent of his
generation, even if he stood increasingly far apart
from his avant-garde contemporaries. In 1915, with Swan
Upping (no.18) still only half-completed, Spencer
enlisted in the Royal Medical Corps.
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