'Love, desire, faith, passion, intimacy, God, spiritual consciousness, curiosity and adventure': The world of Stanley Spencer, a very English visionary

Throughout his life, Stanley Spencer was drawn to the numinous. As a small child, he defined angels as ‘great big white birds wot pecks’; he likened the sound of his brother William, a child prodigy, playing Bach on the organ of the village church, to the joy of angels. The village in question was Cookham, on the Thames, close to Maidenhead in Berkshire, afterwards described by Spencer as ‘my Paradise’. He was born there in 1891 and died there 68 years later: so great was his attachment to it that, as a young man, his fellow Slade School students called him ‘Cookham’. In the village, where his father read the Bible aloud daily to all nine Spencer siblings, he was ‘brought up with the notion that Heaven was, if not all enveloping, at least straight ahead’ and there he would set a number of religious paintings, in which Christ and New Testament figures such as Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, appeared in its lanes and churchyard and among the boats of its annual regatta.

Among Spencer’s particular gifts was an ability to discern the spiritual in the everyday, in the allotments, wrought-iron railings and rows of cabbages of an English village. ‘My feeling for things being holy was very strong,’ he wrote. Sometimes, it came upon him suddenly, he explained in 1934, and he ‘became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy’.

Spencer’s strong religious faith, inculcated during his childhood in what was then a fairly isolated village community, never left him. It encompassed a stirring sense of the wonder of Nature, which also lasted for the rest of his life, colouring every engagement with his surroundings, from a stand of dead nettles encountered in the corner of a meadow to ancient Ming tombs seen on a tour of China in the mid 1950s. A thread of religious absorption was a feature of his volubility, his conversation, a friend remembered, typically ‘of Ibsen and malthouses, frescos, religion and morality’. Unsurprisingly, forceful religious faith irradiated many of his paintings and affected his attitude to realism in his work. As his own focus oscillated between the natural and the supernatural, so his paintings betrayed by turns a pre-Raphaelite level of exactitude and an idiosyncratic stylisation intended to convey the miraculous nature of events being portrayed.

Pure landscapes and Nature studies such as Cookham of 1914, The Vale of Health, Hampstead (about 1940), The May Tree (1933) and Ricketts Farm, Cookham Dene (1938), complete with piglets and lopsided hay ricks, embody what Spencer described as his ‘personal value of the Englishness of England’. Other images set aside conventional realism, their unsettling visual idiom adding to their impact — Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, painted early in his career, and the late Crucifixion of 1958, commissioned for the chapel of a boys’ boarding school.

Art, Spencer once wrote, emerges from a melting pot of feelings and experiences: the mix he described would have surprised some of his contemporaries: ‘Love, desire, faith, passion, intimacy, God, spiritual consciousness, curiosity, adventure.’ Not for Spencer the hostile antithesis of religion and sex that characterised the culture of recent generations, including his own God-fearing parents and grandparents. Sex and an earthy fleshiness also play their part in the work by this preeminent 20th-century English visionary.

A very short man, he conceived a large and distinctive, highly personal vision. Much of it was shaped by events in his own life and the places in which he spent time — Cookham, but also the north of Suffolk, around Wangford and Southwold. The area played a key role in both his art and his personal life, as an exhibition opening this week at Gainsborough’s House Museum in Sudbury, ‘Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk’, reveals. It was there, in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, Wangford, that Spencer married fellow artist Hilda Carline on February 23, 1925, and here that the couple spent their honeymoon.

Spencer made a number of paintings of Suffolk farmyards and landscapes, including Tree and Chicken Coops, Wangford, Turkeys and The Red House, Wangford. When, a decade later, Spencer’s first marriage ended unhappily and he found himself trapped in a loveless, unconsummated second one, he returned alone to north Suffolk in an unsuccessful attempt to rekindle vanished happiness. Then, he painted the beach at Southwold, an enigmatic image with its rows of striped deckchairs and sagging lines of drying bathing costumes. It offers the viewpoint of an observer, detached from the scene, at a remove from the pebbled beach and its happy holiday atmosphere.

Another important influence for him came in the form of early Italian masters, including Duccio, Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Angelico, which he discovered when he trained as an artist at the Slade School from 1908–12, after having been mostly educated at home by his sisters. The directness of their work thrilled him as much as their religious subject matter and led him towards mural painting, which came to occupy an important place in his own output — Spencer frequently referred to himself as a muralist.

Best known among his mural commissions is the sequence of paintings he completed for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. The commission occupied Spencer for six years, much of it shaped by his own experiences in Macedonia during the First World War. He devoted almost a year to the largest panel, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, in which, to remarkable effect, a tangled netsuke of human and animal bodies recedes from view beneath a jumble of white wooden crosses. Cottages at Burghclere, one of his best-loved, most ‘English’ views, was also painted during this period.

Spencer once claimed that his only really significant love affairs had been with places. Chief among them were the village in which he was born and in which he spent much of his life and, as the Gainsborough’s House exhibition shows, landscapes associated with early years of his first marriage. Religion, he said, ‘came into my vision quite naturally, like the sky and rain’. Hypnotically, it coloured sky, rain, fields, rivers, whole villages and whole vistas.

‘Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk’, is at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, from November 15–March 22, 2026 — www.gainsborough.org

Paintings courtesy of Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham; Estate of Stanley Spencer; Bridgeman Images; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Tate

A very Berkshire Eden

There was a ‘sacred quality in most unexpected places’ in Cookham, Stanley Spencer suggested in middle age. This awareness on the artist’s part lent a brooding, pregnant, eerily still quality to a handful of overtly realistic views of the village and its surrounds that he painted in the 1930s. All are characterised by shimmering intensity. Gardens in the Pound, Cookham, with its vivid red bedding plants and rope-twist glazed-terracotta bedding edging, Cookham, Flowers in a Window, in which each vein of hellebore leaf and filament of crocus is crisply delineated, and the magnificent Bellrope Meadow, bathed in golden light, every petal and leaf of purple aster clean cut, all celebrate an earthly Eden rooted in ordinariness, elevated by the artist’s unwavering affection.

The life and times of Stanley Spencer

1891 Born on June 30, the eighth surviving child of William and Anna Spencer, in Cookham, Berkshire

1908 Attends the Slade School of Fine Art, after having been educated at home. His contemporaries include Paul Nash and Dora Carrington

1912 Exhibits in the English section of Roger Fry’s controversial Second post-Impressionist Exhibition, together with Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell

1914 Rents a makeshift studio in Cookham, Wisteria Cottage, and comes to the attention of a prominent collector of modern art, Eddie Marsh, who buys Apple Gatherers and Self-Portrait

1915 Following the outbreak of the First World War, volunteers for ambulance duty with the Royal Army Medical Corps; is sent to Macedonia, where he remains until 1917, when he is ordered home after repeated bouts of malaria

1919 Meets Hilda Carline

1920 Undertakes a series of religious paintings, including Christ Carrying the Cross, for a private oratory in Buckinghamshire

1925 Marries Carline (three years after announcing their engagement); their first daughter, Shirin, is born in November

1927 First one-man exhibition, at Goupil Gallery in London. He begins mural paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere (completed 1932)

1930 Second daughter, Unity, born

1932 Elected Associate of the Royal Academy (RA); meets, and becomes infatuated with artist Patricia Preece, who encourages his affection, despite being herself in a long-term relationship with another woman, Dorothy Hepworth

1935 Resigns from the RA after it rejects St Francis and the Birds and The Dustman or The Lovers from the Summer Exhibition; Carline moves out of the family home

1937 Carline divorces Spencer; he marries Preece, who refuses to consummate their marriage; Spencer requests, but is refused, a second divorce. Unsuccessfully, he attempts a reconciliation with Carline

1940 The War Artists’ Advisory Committee sends Spencer to the shipyards of Glasgow to depict civilians at work

1950 Sir Alfred Munnings, outgoing president of the Royal Academy, brings an obscenity case against Spencer based on drawings in his scrapbook. The case is subsequently dropped and, in the same year, Spencer is appointed CBE

1955 Retrospective exhibition held at Tate

1958 Receives knighthood from Elizabeth II

1959 Dies of cancer on December 13

2011 Sunflower and Dog Worship is sold for £5.4 million, at the time a record sum for a modern British painting

This feature originally appeared in the issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.