63 Facts About Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA 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.

Stanley Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.

Stanley 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.

In later life Stanley 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.

Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire, the eighth surviving child of William and Anna Caroline Spencer.

Stanley Spencer's father, usually known as Par, was a music teacher and church organist.

Stanley Spencer was educated at home by his sisters Annie and Florence, as his parents had reservations about the local council school but could not afford private education for him.

However, Gilbert and Stanley Spencer took drawing lessons from a local artist, Dorothy Bailey.

Par Spencer approached local landowners, Lord and Lady Boston, for advice, and Lady Boston agreed Stanley could spend time drawing with her each week.

In 1907 Lady Boston arranged for Stanley Spencer to attend Maidenhead Technical Institute, where his father insisted he should not take any exams.

From 1908 to 1912, Stanley Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, under Henry Tonks.

In 1912 Stanley Spencer exhibited the painting John Donne Arriving in Heaven and some drawings in the British section of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition organised by Roger Fry in London.

In 1914 Stanley Spencer completed Zacharias and Elizabeth and The Centurion's Servant.

Self-portrait was painted in Wisteria Cottage, a decaying Georgian house Stanley Spencer rented, from the local coalman in Cookham, for use as a studio.

At the start of the First World War Stanley Spencer was keen to enlist but his mother persuaded him, given his poor physique, to apply for ambulance duties.

In 1915 Stanley Spencer volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps, RAMC, and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol, a large Victorian gothic building that had been a lunatic asylum.

Stanley Spencer left Beaufort in May 1916 and after ten weeks' training at Tweseldown Camp in Hampshire, the 24-year-old Spencer was sent to Macedonia, with the 68th Field Ambulance unit.

Stanley Spencer returned to England at the end of 1918 and went back to his parents at Fernlea in Cookham, where he completed Swan Upping, the painting he had left unfinished when he enlisted.

Stanley Spencer had begun the painting by making a small oil study and several drawings from memory before visiting Turks Boatyard beside Cookham Bridge to confirm his composition.

Stanley Spencer worked systematically from top to bottom on the canvas but had only completed the top two-thirds of the picture when he had to leave it in 1915.

In 1919 Stanley Spencer was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to paint a large work for a proposed, but never built, Hall of Remembrance.

Stanley Spencer lived in Cookham until April 1920 when he moved to Bourne End to stay with the trade union lawyer Henry Slesser and his wife.

In 1921 Stanley Spencer stayed with Muirhead Bone at Steep in Hampshire where he worked on mural designs for a village hall war memorial scheme which was never completed.

In 1923 Stanley Spencer spent the summer in Poole, Dorset, with Henry Lamb.

In October 1923, Stanley Spencer started renting Henry Lamb's studio in Hampstead where he began work on The Resurrection, Cookham.

In 1925, Stanley Spencer married Hilda Carline, a former student at the Slade and the sister of the artists Richard and Sydney Carline.

Stanley Spencer repeatedly cancelled, or otherwise postponed, their wedding until 1925.

In February 1927 Stanley Spencer held his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery.

Stanley Spencer created the picture in the early years of his marriage to Hilda and she appears three times in the picture.

Stanley Spencer's paintings cover a twenty-one foot high, seventeen-and-half foot wide end wall, eight seven foot high lunettes, each above a predella, with two twenty-eight feet long irregularly shaped strips between the lunettes and the ceiling.

Stanley Spencer did not depict heroism and sacrifice, but rather in panels such as Scrubbing the Floor, Bedmaking, Filling Tea Urns and Sorting and Moving Kit Bags, the unremarkable everyday facts of daily life in camp or hospital and a sense of human companionship rarely found in civilian life as he remembered events from Beaufort, Macedonia and Tweseldown Camp.

Stanley Spencer imagined the Resurrection of the Soldiers taking place outside the walled village of Kalinova in Macedonia with soldiers rising out of their graves and handing in identical white crosses to a Christ figure towards the top of the wall.

Much later in his life Stanley Spencer adapted seven of these sketches into paintings including The Dustbin, Cookham painted in 1958.

In 1929 Stanley Spencer had met the artist Patricia Preece, and he soon became infatuated with her.

In one version, Stanley Spencer envisaged the building would include bedrooms as chapels, fireplaces as altars and decorated bathrooms and lavatories while other versions of the scheme were more like an English parish church.

The Royal Academy rejected both pictures, and Stanley Spencer resigned from the Academy in protest.

Stanley Spencer made a return visit to Switzerland in 1935, and Patricia Preece travelled with him.

Stanley Spencer sent their older daughter Shirin to live with a relative.

Between the middle of 1935 and 1936 Stanley Spencer painted a series of nine pictures, known as the Domestic Scenes in which he recalled, or re-imagined, life with Hilda at home.

Stanley Spencer painted naked portraits of Preece in 1935 and 1936 and, in 1936, a double nude portrait of himself and Preece, Self-Portrait with Patricia Preece, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

In October 1938 Stanley Spencer had to leave Cookham and moved to London, spending six weeks with John Rothenstein before moving to a bedsit in Swiss Cottage.

At this low point Stanley Spencer painted four of the canvases in the Christ in the Wilderness series.

Stanley Spencer originally intended to paint a series of 40, one representing each day of Jesus's sojourn in the wilderness, but in the end only eight were completed and a ninth was left unfinished.

Stanley Spencer created many important works in his room above the bar of the White Hart Inn which he used as a studio, including Us in Gloucestershire and The Wool Shop.

Stanley Spencer became fascinated by what he saw and sent WAAC proposals for a scheme involving up to sixty-four canvases displayed on all four sides of a room.

Stanley Spencer delivered Welders in March 1941 and in May 1941 saw the two paintings hanging together for the first time at the WAAC exhibition in the National Gallery.

Between trips to Port Glasgow, Stanley Spencer was renting a room in Epsom, to be near Hilda and his children, but the landlady there disliked him and he wanted to move back to Cookham and work on the paintings in his old studio but he could not afford to rent it from Preece, so WAAC agreed further financial help for that purpose.

In May 1942, Stanley Spencer delivered Template, followed by twelve portraits of Clydesiders in October 1942.

Stanley Spencer made further visits to Glasgow and by June 1944 had completed Riggers and begun work on Plumbers.

In November 2006, the Imperial War Museum asked Sir Alex Ferguson, whose father, brother and an uncle were working in the yards while Stanley Spencer was there, to lead a campaign to fund restoration of Stanley Spencer's paintings of the Port Glasgow's shipyards.

In 1945 Stanley Spencer returned to live in Cookham in a house called Cliveden View, which had once belonged to his brother Percy.

Stanley Spencer wanted the entire series displayed together, but each piece was sold to a different collector or gallery.

Stanley Spencer appears to have removed some drawings from his private scrapbooks and continued to ensure that the Leg of mutton nude would not be exhibited during his lifetime.

Stanley Spencer was appointed a CBE and the new President of the Royal Academy, Sir Gerald Kelly, who had supported Spencer in the obscenity case, persuaded him to rejoin the Royal Academy, as an Associate before being elected an Academician.

Stanley Spencer visited his elder brother Harold in Northern Ireland in 1951,1952 and 1953, painting portraits of Harold's daughter, Daphne, and urban scenes there, most notably Merville Garden Village near Belfast in 1951.

In 1952 Stanley Spencer made a small number of lithographs on the theme of the Marriage at Cana which were published in a limited edition of thirty that year and reprinted in an edition of 70 after his death.

In 1958 Stanley Spencer painted The Crucifixion which was set in Cookham High Street and first displayed in Cookham Church.

Stanley Spencer was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Southampton University in 1958, three days before he received his knighthood at Buckingham Palace.

Stanley Spencer underwent an operation at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital on the Cliveden estate in 1959.

Stanley Spencer was cremated and his ashes interred in Cookham churchyard, beside the path through to Bellrope Meadow.

The value of Stanley Spencer's paintings soared after a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980.

Stanley Spencer was a prolific writer of lists and the archive contains several that offer insights to specific paintings plus other material such as lists of rooms for the Church-House project, lists of plants in his own paintings and even a list of the jewellery he bought for Patricia Preece.