Sir Stanley Spencer

Daphne

1940

© Estate of Stanley Spencer

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Not on display

Artist: Sir Stanley Spencer 1891–1959
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 610 × 508 mm
frame: 822 × 726 × 105 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1940
Reference: N05148

Display caption

Daphne Charlton was a student at the Slade School of Art in London, as was Stanley Spencer, and her husband George taught there. The Charltons were introduced to Spencer in 1939 and from then on he often visited them at their Hampstead home. All three went on a painting holiday together in the summer of 1939 to Leonard Stanley, a remote village in Gloucestershire. During this stay Daphne Charlton painted Spencer's portrait. In April 1940, back in London, she sat for this portrait every day for about two to three weeks. The hat she wears was bought for three guineas in a shop in Bond Street in December 1939, especially for the sittings. Spencer painted another portrait of her without her hat.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

N05148 DAPHNE 1940

Not inscribed.
Canvas, 20×24 (51×61).
Purchased from the artist through Arthur Tooth & Sons (Knapping Fund) 1940.
Exh: Tate Gallery, November–December 1955 (61).
Lit: Collis, 1962, pp.160–2, 246.
Repr: Rothenstein, 1945, as frontispiece (in colour) and pl.76 (detail).

The sitter is Daphne Charlton, wife of the artist George Charlton and an artist in her own right. This portrait was done when she was thirty and she gave sittings to Spencer every day for two or three weeks in April 1940 when he had returned to London from a long stay with the Charltons at the White Hart Inn in the remote Gloucestershire village of Leonard Stanley. Spencer bought the hat for the portrait. Another portrait of her, without a hat, was sold at Christie's, 13 November 1964 (59, repr.).

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II