Patrick Bade
Stanley Spencer: Eccentric Genius

Patrick Bade - Stanley Spencer, Eccentric Genius

- This is Stanley Spencer in a self-portrait. He is an artist that many critics have a problem with. They don’t really know how to place him in 20th century art. He doesn’t quite, he doesn’t really fit in to the mainstream. He can’t be pigeonholed. Most critics will acknowledge his extraordinary skills, particularly as a draughtsman, and the originality of his view of the world. But in fact, originality is one of the qualities that’s always stressed. The Penguin Dictionary of Art says that he’s one of the most original of modern painters, but one senses in that a certain ambiguity, for originality, you can also read eccentricity, or quirkiness. And lots of critiques of Stanley Spencer take on a slightly jokey and even condescending tone. When he was a student at the Slade, his teacher, Henry Tonks, said “He has shown signs of having the most original mind of anyone we have ever had at the Slade, which he combines with great powers of draughtsmanship.” This is where, I suppose, where the quirkiness, the eccentricity, the oddness comes in. This painting, it’s called “The Worship of Sunflowers and Dogs.” And Stanley, as I’m going to call him, everybody calls, he’s one of those artists where you feel you have to call him by the first name rather than the second name. And he explained solemnly about this picture that it’s a husband and wife, and the man is carrying his wife’s handbag so that she can make love to a sunflower more effectively. And it’s very characteristic of his rather sort of pantheistic view of the world. That we should all be united by universal love, and that God is in everywhere in nature. He loves dogs. Well, we know that English people love dogs, and is having a lot of fun observing dogs and doggy behaviour, lifting her legs, sniffing each other’s backsides, licking and so on. And here’s another picture that expresses a similar idea.

It’s called “The Glorifying of the Dust Man,” or “The Lovers.” And he explained with this picture, the wife carries the dustman in her arms and experiences the bliss of union with his corduroy trousers. And what it shows is not just the dustman and his wife, but everybody is rummaging through the dust bins and pulling everything out. Waste, cabbage, broken crockery, empty cans, and so on. And holding them up to admire them and worship them. As far as he’s concerned, nothing is ugly, everything is beautiful. And even the contents for a dustbin is God’s creation, and we should treat it as such. Here is Stanley in old age, but still looking like a little boy. He was a kind of man-child, a sort of weird, like a weird hyperactive child right through his life to the very end. And I’d like to quote Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire, the great French romantic poet who said, who defined genius as childhood recaptured will. And he was a sort of Peter Pan character who never grew up. But he had this sense of wonder at everything. I’m sure many of you I know will have had the experience of taking your grandchildren, three-year old out shopping, and how a three-year old will look at everything. Post boxes, shop windows, everything in the street with a sense of wonder and awe and fascination. And he had the ability to a remarkable degree, to retain this sense of wonder at everything around him to the end of his life. Now, this is an early self portrait made when he was a student that suggests that at this stage he was certainly taking himself seriously. It’s over life size.

And as you can see, it’s frontal, with this distant visionary stare. So he’s showing himself really as a prophet, even a Christ-like figure, that frontal pose, of course, goes back to images of Christ. Here is a self-portrait by Durer from the early 16th century where he, well, 1500, as you can see the date on it. Where he’s showing himself with a similar frontal pose and unnerving stare. And he himself, of course, has taken that image from the standard image of Christ, Salvatore Mundi, Christ as the saviour of the world. This is the Leonardo that was recently discovered, or may or may not be by Leonardo or partly by him, that caused such a furore when it was revealed a few years ago. And here are two romantic self-portraits, two British romantic artists, Turner on the left hand side, and Samuel Palmer on the right, who adopt a similar kind of frontal pose and visionary stare. Stanley Spencer was born in 1891 in Cookham, in Berkshire. And that’s where he came back to end his life and where he spent indeed a a great deal of his life. And it was a very, very important formative influence on him. This is Cookham common. And in fact, he never spent a single night away from Cookham until he had been a student in London for over a couple of years. For the first few years. In fact, when he first enrolled at the Slade in London, I’ll talk more about the Slade later. It was the most important art school in Britain around the beginning of the 20th century. His father would come with him every day and hold his hand to help him cross the Houston Road.

Slade School is probably 10 minutes walk from Houston Station. So, as I said, he remained this very innocent childlike character, even as an adult. And this sense of being formed by a place, that’s something he shares with other British artists. This is Constable, in Constable country. And there’s a wonderful letter by Constable where he’s talking about the grass and the water, and the rotting boards on the canal and all that sort of thing. And he says, “These scenes made a painter of me.” And if you go and see this picture of Flatfoot Mill in the Tate Gallery, you’ll see that he’s, you can just about see it in this image, that he’s signed it by as though his name is gouged out the soil, in the foreground. There’s this incredible sense of identification with place. And we also have it with Samuel Palmer for the great years of his career. Early in his career when he painted his greatest pictures. Shoreham in Kent. And what he shares with Stanley Spencer is the sense of, for Spencer it was Cookham, with Palmer at Shoreham, being a holy place, that one senses the presence of God in these landscapes. And Sammy Spencer described Cookham as a holy suburb of heaven. And he said, “Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are not aware.” So he’s a very religious man, but not in any kind of conventional Christian way. He paints Christian subjects. This is the nativity. And for him, it is just a perfectly natural thing that the nativity should be depicted as happening on Cookham Common. You could say this is not so different from the old masters. It’s not really ‘til you get to the 19th century and people like Holman Hunt that, you know, Holman Hunt took himself off to the Middle East, to see what the holy land really looked like. But of course, in the Renaissance, artists had no knowledge of the Middle East, and the great Italian renaissance artists and the Flemish artists, they also depicted biblical scenes as though they were happening in the local landscape.

This is Zacharias and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist. This is a very lush looking Palestine, isn’t it? It’s, again, of course it’s set in Cookham. And in an always Proustian way, Stanley Spencer’s art is infused with memories of his childhood. This is a story from the Christian Bible from the New Testament, the centurion’s servant, where the centurion goes to Jesus and says, “My servant is very ill, he’s dying.” And Jesus practises sort of distance healing. And when the centurion goes home, he finds that in fact his servant is well and has survived. But in this, it’s a very strange picture, it seems to be Stanley himself, that he’s shown himself as a centurion’s servant. And the strange atmosphere of this painting is infused with two memories. One is his mother telling him that when she was a girl, it was the practise when somebody was dying, that the family would gather round the bed while the person was dying. And the other memory that infuses this picture is of his own childhood. He lived in a semi-detached house in Cookham. And there was a party wall. And at night when he went to bed, he could hear voices from the other side of the party wall. And for him as a child, these were mysterious voices from another world. And I think he’s tried to convey that with this rather ominous wall in the background here. And there’s another painting, which is infused with the memory of his childhood. They were not desperately poor. I suppose you’d describe them as lower middle class. His father was a music teacher. He only had one pair of trousers. So when the trousers need to be washed and hung on the washing line, his father would wander around in his dressing gown. And this painting from well into Stanley’s career, it’s painted in 1935, it shows St. Francis of Assisi with birds, but he’s painted St. Francis of Assisi in his father’s dressing gown. And this is another painting that is set in Cookham, where there were oast houses, you know, where the hops are hung to dry to make beer.

And in order to dry the hops, they have these hoods that can turn according to the direction of the wind. And so, as a child, of course, he didn’t really know what they were for, but they were these strange structures in the town that moved, and seemed to be an expression of some kind of mysterious, otherworldly life. And that’s, this painting’s called “Mending Cows.” They’re the cows of the oast houses that has a tremendous, almost surreal sense of strangeness. So 1908. he went to study at the Slade School. Slade School was an alternative to the Royal Academy. And it’s where the more adventurous and interesting artists went to train at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th. So Gwen John, Augustus John were there slightly before Stanley Spencer. You can see, where is he now? Yes, he’s second from the right in the front row, that is Stanley. And in amongst these, his fellow students are Dora Carrington, Mark Burtler, Paul Nash, Nevinson. It was a very productive and rich generation, for English artists who all trained at the Slade in the early 1900s. At 1908, of course that’s quite interesting too, when you think 1907, Edwin Sheila enrolled at the academy in Vienna. 1907 was the same year of course, that Hitler wanted to enrol, but was rejected for his lack of talent. So Stanley Spencer is there from 1908 'til 1913. And his training consisted almost exclusively of drawing. Henry Tonks, who I quoted praising his incredible drawing skills was his teacher.

And that certainly, anybody who went to the Slade at that time picked up a very, very accomplished drawing technique. But Stanley outshone everybody in this respect. And I show you this photograph on the left, 'cause it shows this kind of furious concentration when he’s looking at something. And he’s really exploring every detail. This is a drawing, which I’m happy to say belongs to me. It’s not here in Paris, it’s in my bedroom in London, I bought it at Pristis in the 1980s. I don’t know who it depicts. But it’s characteristic of, I mean, it’s a fantastic drawing, really. You could compare this with a Renaissance drawing, you could compare it with Durer or some great Florentine artist. And what I love about it is that he is exploring this woman’s face, he’s mapping this woman’s face. Every wrinkle of her face is lovingly and intensively explored. Here is a drawing he made of his future wife, Hilda Carline. And I put for comparison, this is a Rossetti of Lizzie Sidel on the right hand side. So there is I think a Pre-Raphaelite quality in his work throughout. When I’m talking about Pre-Raphaelite, I mean the first type of Pre-Raphaelitism. Actually more the Millet, Horman Hunt type. But the beginning of Pre-Raphaelitism where they really, you know, select nothing, reject nothing, every hair, everything drawn in from life. So in his four years at the Slade, only three days were devoted to learning painting technique. So he’s very, in this great dichotomy you’ve got in western art between linear and painterly, he’s completely on the linear side, to a very extreme degree. And his creativeness is really in his drawing.

They’re always very elaborate drawings, preparatory drawings for all his pictures. There are two types of drawings with Stanley Spencer. There are either drawings that are from life that look like that portrait I’ve just shown you, or there are drawings from memory and imagination. But either way, when he painted a picture, the drawing comes first. And then the drawing will be transferred to a white canvas. You can just see in this, this is a unfinished painting. Unfinished paintings are always fascinating 'cause they tell you how an artist work. In the bottom right hand corner, you should just be able to see the squaring up. So the drawings that he will have made for this will have been on a much smaller scale, and then you square up, you square up the canvas, and you can enlarge the drawings and transfer them to the canvas that way. But his technique, once he starts painting, is effectively painting by numbers. 'Cause you’ve got all the contours there for the whole composition. And then he systematically works across the canvas, filling in the contours. So it’s a very, very unpainterly way of working. Here’s another drawing of him. You can see how he just moves across the canvas, filling in the contours with colour. And here you can see rather better the squares for the squaring up. So Pre-Raphaelitism is certainly, I would say, a continuing influence. So he came from, his father was a music teacher, he was very musical. So he grew up with music. Particularly the music of Bach. But this is a lower middle class family on a very restricted income. And I think it takes some kind of effort now, everything, so much is so available to us now. We’ve all got our mobile. You can sit in a, even I do this and it’s a dreadful thing. You sit with friends in a restaurant, you are chatting away, I might say to my French friends, “Oh, have you heard of Stanley Spencer?”

And I can pull out my phone and I can show paintings of Stanley Spencer in colour to people at the dinner table. Well, obviously that wasn’t possible in 1900. And expensive illustrated books would not have been available to a family like Stanley Spencer’s. There were two works of art in his family house, and they were steel engravings of the two Pre-Raphaelite pictures. The Millet Ophelia you see on the left, and the Dante Gabriel Rossetti. So this was art as far as he was concerned. Of course, as I told you, he’d never travelled away from Cookham. So he had an extremely, extremely restricted cultural background of a kind we can hardly imagine today. This is a painting again of Cookham by Stanley Spencer, which has this Pre-Raphaelite intensity of observation, and those very strong colours of the early Pre-Raphaelite pictures. And for comparison, I show you this painting by Holman Hunt. So when he was a student before the First World War, all his fellow students, and all the more adventurous English artists of the period looked to Paris for inspiration. And they all travelled to Paris, and they were very interested in French art. And this painting is by William Orpen, and it’s called “Homage to Manet.” And it’s Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzales on the wall in the background. And underneath this painted by Manet, Manet of course had been dead for 20 years when this picture was painted, but we have gathered important people of the art establishment in England. There’s Sekat there standing in the background.

And there is Henry Tonks, who is Stanley Spencer’s teacher. He’s the one seated in the foreground on the right hand side. So you certainly would’ve been very encouraged to look at French painting. And at 1910 there is the groundbreaking exhibition in London organised by Roger Fry, going to be talking about this in a week or so that introduced a modern French art to the London public. And the title of the show was “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” And on the right hand side is a painting by an artist, the Camden Town Group, Spencer Gore, which is entitled “Gauguin’s at the Grafton Gallery.” It was particularly Gauguin, I think Gauguin, who really impressed the young, more avant-garde of British artists with a flat paint surface and the bright colours and simplification of form. Stanley Spencer later pretended to be completely uninterested in French art, and he said he thought that French art was utterly lacking in spiritual grace, a very dismissive comment. I think he may have been protesting a bit too much there, but it’s true. He wasn’t really interested in the French, and he wasn’t one of those artists who nipped over to Paris, which would’ve been very easy to do even before Eurostar. But I think though he couldn’t avoid, I mean he actually took part in the second post-impressionist show. He certainly saw all those Gauguins, and I think and other French artists. And for comparison, I’ve got a bit of Vuillard, Edouard Vuillard on the right hand side. And the similarities are pretty obvious, aren’t they? That sense of abstract pattern, and flatness, patch flat, whole picture made up as Moisonee famously said, “painting before it’s a nude or a horse is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.”

And that would be quite a good description of either of these two pictures. Right. He was particularly pleased with this picture, which the title is “Two Girls with a Beehive.” And they were actually local girls, Dorothy and Emily Worcester. They were the daughters of the local butcher. And my guess is that Stanley really fancied them, probably from afar. And he said, “This picture marks my becoming conscious of the rich religious significance of the place I lived. My feelings for things being holy was very strong at this time.” And it’s a very strange picture. You’ve got the ghostly image of Christ in the background with the hook. Can you see it behind the fence? Who seems to be, who looks like a holy flasher who’s leaping out from the bushes. My feeling about this picture is that this intensity and this slightly weird religious feeling is a symptom of his repressed sexuality, at this time he did not, in fact, he never had sex until he got married in 1925. Although, as we shall see, he was certainly a very sexual person, and very interested in sex when he finally discovered it. This picture is called “The Apple Gatherers.” And it won him the Slade Prize when he left in 1913. And I think it’s another picture where you can’t altogether dismiss the French influence, particularly the influence of Gauguin. “Apple Gatherers” on the left. And a Gauguin, or, I don’t know if you saw this particular one, but he certainly saw very similar ones in the post-impressionist show.

But as a counteractive to the modern French influence, I think it’s true to say he was more interested in art, the Italian artists that would’ve been called primitives at the time, Italian primitives, nobody uses that term anymore. But early Italian artists. And there’s, again, you may think of the Pre-Raphaelites, who were inspired by the early Italians, but the difference is that the Pre-Raphaelites only knew Italian art through line engravings. They didn’t have any Italian art, early Italian art to look at. But in the meantime, in that 50 years since the, or 60 years since the pre-Raphaelite revolution, the National Gallery had acquired probably the greatest collection of early renaissance art outside of Italy. So Stanley could go to the National Gallery, it’s free, it’s still free as you know. And he could go and absorb the influence of the early Renaissance, and also, the National Gallery brought out sixpenny books. They just cost sixpence or a shilling, which were illustrated, I suppose they would’ve been black and white illustrations. But on all that Mazjoto, Mazacho and so on. And Stanley acquired these and he studied them very closely. This is a picture dating from 1920 of Christ carrying the cross, again, through the streets of Cookham. And there’s a detail of a jotter fresco on the right hand side. When you look at the angels leaning out of the windows, it’s pretty obvious that he’s had a close look at Jotter. This is the final picture that Stanley painted before the outbreak of the First World War, which was a very decisive event in his life, as it was for all the young men of his generation. And it’s called “Swan Upping at Cookham.” And it records an event that takes place every year when the dyers and vintners Guild have the duty of rounding up the swans for a kind of census of swans on the river Thames. And I think it’s an example of this, that Stanley has so often, of seeing something banal and ordinary and making it look strange and extraordinary.

Particularly you can see the detail of, the swans are tied up and carried off in carpenter’s bags. And it makes me think rather actually Max Ernst a few years later who was obsessed by birds and did bird people, people with birds’ heads. And so, the man carrying the swan, of course you can’t see his head. The swan seems to be his head. So this was a painting that he painted from memory. But he went down to the Thames. Those of you who know this part of the Thames and rivers in southeast of England will recognise that bridge. It’s a very accurate rendition of a cast iron bridge of a kind that you find many in the southeast of England. So the war breaks out, and he volunteers for military service, but he’s rejected. I mean, that is really something extraordinary ‘cause they were, the first world war, particularly, I’d say the British more than the Germans. It was this incredible industrial slaughter. And the ordinary people like Stanley were just treated like cannon fodder. But he was rejected 'cause he was tiny and he was underweight. And there obviously didn’t think he’d survive two minutes of the western front. So instead of serving in the military, he volunteered as a nurse, a medical worker, and the early part of the war, he worked in a military hospital in Bristol. And then later he volunteered for foreign service, and he served as a stretcher bearer in Macedonia in the war against Turkey. But right at the end of the war, he was commissioned as a military artist.

There was a scheme in the First World War that many artists took part in. And this extraordinary painting, masterpiece, I think, was a result of that. A picture painted from memory. In fact, while he was serving on the Macedonian front, he kept notebooks, but at some point he’d lost them. So this painting is painted completely from memory. And let me give you the full title. It’s got a rather long title. It’s “Travois with Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station, Small Macedonia.” So he must have seen unspeakable horrors. And, especially something like this, we’ve got a field hospital where you had soldiers being brought in with limbs torn off. Hideous, hideous, terrible injuries. Unbelievably awful images that came about through the nature of 20th century warfare, the First World War, which as I said was industrial warfare. And you can imagine in the midst of a battle, and, you know, limbs being amputated and operations being done, probably with little or no anaesthetic. The pain, the horror, the squalor must have been unbelievable. But it’s typical of Stanley that he doesn’t want to paint that, he doesn’t want to record that. And he said specifically that he wanted to create a sense of calm and peace and acceptance. And that as the wounded soldiers are brought in, there is a sense of wellbeing. The composition is interesting. With, you know, the strong light of course in the operating theatre. And all these diagonals leading towards it. And again, it’s very clear that this type of composition is based on a Renaissance form, in “Adoration of the Magi,” where you get all these diagonals leading towards the Christ child. And this is Botticelli, top left hand side. And for comparison, I’d like to show you this, by Otto Dix. So we’ve got two paintings here that are based on personal experience and recollections of what the artist had experienced during the First World War.

They both experienced unbelievable horror. Stanley in Macedonia and Otto Dix on the western front. And of course Otto Dix, his painting, which is just called the “Der Kreig,” “The War.” It is quite, is the absolute opposite of Stanley. It’s really emphasising the squalor and the horror. But there’s an interesting comparison in that, like Stanley, he’s conceived his memorial to the First World War in terms of a Renaissance altarpiece, a Renaissance polyptych. Although in this case, I think he’s looking back to northern Renaissance. He’s looking back to Bosch and Gruegel and so on. So amazingly, Stanley, this little tiny, frail, innocent person, he survives the First World War. Was of course a terrible, there’d been two enormous, enormous culling of human life in the two world wars. In the First World War, it was primarily, of course, young men of military age, who knows how many great artists, great writers, great musicians, we know of some, but many thousands more must have been lost. And of course in the Holocaust where there was, it wasn’t just young men, it was all of Jewish humanity that was lost. Judy always says, you know, that they may well have killed the cure for cancer in that terrible culling of the Holocaust. So Stanley survived, strengthened. I mean he had a, obviously, his fragility, his apparent fragility was deceptive. He was actually I think a pretty tough, resilient character. And in the interwar period, there are two great, great masterpieces, “The Cookham Resurrection” and the Sandham Memorial Chapel. This is “The Cookham Resurrection,” which was painted between 1924, 1927, when it was exhibited, it was universally greeted as a masterpiece. This is not a very good reproduction, actually it’s a very difficult picture to reproduce on a computer screen. It’s in the Tate Gallery. So I would urge you to go and see it.

But it was immediately bought for the nation. And that was a remarkable thing at the time in the 1920s for an artist still young to have his picture bought straight away for the nation. Now the theme of the resurrection was one that obsessed Stanley. And he painted nine versions of the theme of the resurrection, this is the most famous one. But it’s a very particular view, the resurrection, the the last judgement , when people are supposed to come back to life, come out of their tombs. Of course, American born-again Christian, still very keen on this idea, but traditionally in western art it’s shown with the blessed and the good of course going to heaven, and the wicked and the non-believers going down to hell. But with Stanley there is no hell. Everybody is going to heaven as far as Stanley is concerned. And you can see that, well, I dunno how well you can see and there’s not very good reproduction. But in the middle there, you can see Africans coming out of parched earth, in Cookham Churchyard of all places. He himself, he represents himself three times in this picture, on the left, you may be able to see, you can see he’s one of those men who’s being dusted down by his wife, Hilda at this time, Hilda Carline. She is shown, so she’s shown twice, she’s shown dusting him down. She’s also shown in the leafy tomb in the middle of the picture. And he is shown three times. He’s being dusted down, you see him nude just right of the centre.

And you see him on the right hand bottom corner between two tombs, and he said he’s shown himself, the two tombs is to suggest that he’s lying between the pages of a book. 'Cause his idea of heaven is a good book. Well, one of the comments on this picture when it was first shown was that it was painted by a Pre-Raphaelite who’d shaken hands with a cubist. And I think that’s actually a rather good description. He painted that picture incidentally in the studio of his friend Henry Lamb in the Veil of Health in Hamstead. It’s a very big picture. Of course Stanley, as I said, he’s a tiny man. I’m not sure if he was much more than five foot. And so for these big pictures, these mural sized pictures, he needed to climb up and down ladders to paint them. Here are rather better details. You can see the men being dusted down by their wives, and the two self-portraits of Stanley, the nude one, which has a slight suggestion, I think, of the crucifixion, And the one on the right hand side where he’s between the tombs, as though between the pages of the book. Now perhaps his greatest masterpiece though is the Sandham Memorial Chapel. And this was commissione in 1923 and completed in 1932. And it was commissioned by the family of a young soldier, Lieutenant Sandham, who, he’d been in the same Macedonian campaign as Stanley. And he had contracted an illness, and he died of that illness. So I think the fact that Stanley had been involved in the same campaign was a big factor in the choice of the family for him. So there’s a custom built chapel, as you can see here, very simple, not particularly distinguished architecture.

Could easily be a bank, a sort of Midland bank or a National Westminster Bank in a provincial town, red brick building. Here is the interior. I do urge you, if you can, to go and see it. I’ve only been there, someone who doesn’t drive. You’ve got to be able to drive to get there or get somebody to drive you there. And the last time I saw it, actually, it must be well over 10 years ago. I went with my father who was a professional soldier through most of his life. That was a very, very moving experience, 'cause he was so moved by it, to go with him and get his perspective as a soldier on the Sandham Memorial Chapel. The paintings are, they’re not actually murals. They’re not painted on the wall. They’re painted on canvas attached to the walls. And as you can, I think you can see that the model is a renaissance chapel, particularly the Arena Chapel in Padua I think is the inspiration for the whole thing. And it’s very, actually it’s very autobiographical. It’s memories of his own experiences, either in the military hospital in Bristol, or of the campaign in Macedonia. So this is the first image. And this, there is Stanley on the other side of the, opening up the gates for the bus, bringing in the wounded soldiers that he’s going to be looking after. And the paintings of the Sandham Memorial, of the Bristol Hospital, Beaufort Hospital in Bristol, show very banal every day tasks like making beds. But for Stanley, again, everything in life has a religious dimension. So these very simple tasks, making beds, scrubbing floors, cleaning baths.

They all take on the sense of some kind of religious ritual. But this mysticism, this religiosity is of course connected with a very sharp eye for reality. And the background here, you can see in a hospital how people were allowed to put up photographs of their loved ones or religious images or Charlie Chaplin or whoever. And actually in amongst images here, the woman in the deck chair, top left, is painted after a photograph of his wife, Hilda Carline. And we’ve got the laundry. Washing out the bathrooms. This particularly gruesome one actually here, one of his tasks was to deal with people with trench foot. This was a horrible, horrible condition contracted on the western front where people rotted alive. So they had to be in beds with a kind of. they couldn’t stand the weight of sheets or blankets 'cause that would’ve pulled away the flesh. And Stanley had the gruesome task of scraping away the dead flesh. And this is a scene I find very touching and moving where another job that he had was painting iodine onto the wounds of the soldiers in the washroom. And I’d like to compare this with a very famous picture by Ernst Kirchner, who was conscripted and served on the German side. I’ll never forget the impact of this picture at the Royal Academy in the 1980s. It was a big survey of 20th century art. And this was the first picture in the show./ And it had a little room in itself. You went into that room and you saw, and it was amazing to, people walked in, they looked at it and they were rooted at the spot with horror. And most people seeing this picture the first time thought of gas chambers of the Second World War, which is ahistorical, 'cause this is the First World War.

It’s long before the Nazi gas chambers. But it’s not totally wrong, that reaction, 'cause this is a painting about dehumanisation, about loss of identity, about degradation. And when, and you compare that with, what Stanley Spencer draws the opposite conclusion from a similar situation of a communal bathroom. This is all about brotherhood and tenderness. It’s very tender picture, about brotherly love, I would say. This is the only picture in the whole chapel in which you see an officer. And it’s a scene of map reading, but it looks like a wonderful picnic or post-picnic with people resting in the grass. This scene is the reveille, waking up in the morning. in the mosquito nets. Of course we’re in Macedonia, but I think there’s a strong sense here, once again, of his obsession with resurrection from the dead. And all this leads up to the great resurrection, last judgement , on the final wall behind the altar, where all the soldiers from that carnage on the western front, they rise out of their tombs and they pull up the crosses and they make great pile of these crosses. And I always think of this scene. When the days where before Eurostar, when you used to drive across Northern France to get to Paris. And there were these, you go past these endless ceremonies, with white cross, cemeteries, with white crosses going off into the distance as far as the eye can see.

So 1925 when he’s working on this, he marries Hilda Carline, who was also a student at the Slade and a student of Henry Tonks. And she was, I think, a gifted artist. This is her self-portrait on the right hand side, and his portrait of her with one of their two daughters on the left hand side. And in a way it’s a great love story, but a tragic one between these two. And I remember in the 1980s going to a talk by her brother Richard Carline, who was an also an artist trained at the Slade, and he said it was a very loving marriage. They really loved one another, but it was, poor Hilda, she was just exhausted. She had two daughters to look after. Stanley was like a hyperactive child. His energy was off the scale. He was a very prolific artist, turning up enormous amount of drawings and paintings. He would write, every day he’d write letters to her, sometimes up to a hundred pages long. When it came to nighttime, he had the sexual app appetite of a bunny rabbit, he wanted to bonk all night long, and in between that, he wanted to read her his 100-page letters. And according to Richard Carline, her brother, she was, it was too much. She could hardly get up in the morning. She was just exhausted. He wrote all these letters to her, even after they were divorced, and even after they died, she died, rather, he would still write these enormous long letters to her every day. And this is a sketch, one of his letters, with a sketch of him with all these letters that he wrote to Hilda. Now this may be more of Stanley than you want to know, on the left hand side. This is a nude self-portrait, for comparison I put the Durer. These are extraordinary.

I can’t think of any other self-portraits in Western art apart from these two of where a male artist examines his own body in quite such a merciless detail. Now, as I said, Stanley was a virgin 'til he married in 1925, but when he just discovered sex, oh my dear, did he ever discover it. And of course he was, poor Hilda was exhausted, she couldn’t keep up with him. And into the village of Cookham moved a local femme fatale called Patricia Priest, And she, of course, Stanley was very famous, and he was earning quite well, she was very interested, and she really led him on. And he started spending lots of money on her, on buying her expensive underwear, and gramophone records, of course this is a drawing he made of her dancing to one of her gramophone records. As I said, he bought her expensive, I don’t think Hilda was getting underwear like this. This was seriously expensive underwear for Patricia. And he said he wanted to explore her body as an ant would, crawling over the body, every nook and every cranny of the body. And this painting, incidentally, I had real trouble getting these images. I had to switch off the parental controls on my internet to download these images. Otherwise, obviously some people regard them as pornographic. He certainly didn’t. He regarded this as, typically of Stanley, as a religious image. And he had a fantasy of creating a building which he called the church house, which was going to be in the form of a name of a church with side chapels, with altars. And he envisaged this picture, which is Stanley himself looking longingly at Patricia, and a leg of mutton in the foreground.

He imagined it being on an altar, and that one would sit in front of it and contemplate it and even say one’s prayers in front of it. Very different. I mean to many people, of course, it looks grotesque. But he didn’t see it that way. He certainly didn’t. And once again, that comparison with Otto Dix on the left hand side, who is clearly consciously grotesque, and revelling in the grotesquery. Again, Patricia, a scary woman, I would say, Comparison, Stanley Spencer on the left, Otto Dix on the right, where there is a sense of ugliness really, but Stanley didn’t, obviously he thought Patricia was gorgeous, he loved her. Here, just a comparison because stylistically, there is a very interesting comparison with the German art of the new objectivity, the Neue Sachlichkeit. This is Christian Shad on the right hand side, probably a transvestite prostitute. And this is Stanley’s painting of his wife’s maid. So, visually, stylistically they’re really quite alike, but, whoa, it’s a different mood, isn’t it? Well eventually, Stanley has to make some decisions 'cause he’s longing, longing to have sex with Patricia, and she won’t. I mean, she lets him paint her nude, explore her body, but she says, no, I’m not going to have sex with you until I get the ring on my finger. So he divorces poor, long-suffering Hilda. And then Patricia says to him, right, I won’t have sex with you unless you sign over your house and all your property to me. And, stupid man, he does it. And then she still doesn’t come up with the goods.

And then, she says to him, right, well, we’re going to have our honeymoon in the the west country. I’ll go ahead and wait for you, and you stay behind, and you can stay with your former wife, Hilda. So at that point he thinks, “Aha, I’m going to get exactly what I want.” Which is, you know, to have both wives. That would’ve suited him just fine. So his wedding night, he actually spends with his former wife, Hilda. And Patricia goes down to Cornwall with her girlfriend, Dorothy Hepworth. And then of course Danny turns up and she says, “You dirty beast, you spent our wedding night with your wife, I’m not going to have sex with you.” So they never had sex, actually. Of course Patricia was in a lesbian relationship with Dorothy. I love this, well I love it, but it’s so poignant, it’s so sad. Poor Stanley, at this point looking like the cat that’s got the cream, he just looks like he’s, you know, yes, he’s got it all, it’s all wonderful. Of course Dorothy, Patricia’s girlfriend on the left hand side not looking or that pleased with the situation. But I think Patricia, she was a bit, she was a monster. She was exploiting Stanley, and she was exploiting her girlfriend Dorothy. She, Patricia built up quite a reputation for herself as an artist. She exhibited pictures that were highly praised and sold well, and it turned out eventually she hadn’t painted any of them. That this, here is a picture that was supposedly by Patricia, but it was actually Dorothy who was painting the pictures and letting Patricia sign them for her. And this is my last image. Oh dear, I wish this were, maybe if you can look this up online, you might be able to find details. But anyway, it gives you the general impression. It’s such a wonderful picture. It’s called “Love Among the Nations.” And Stanley said he was inspired, he got the idea for this painting, when he was carrying stretchers on the front in Macedonia.

And there’s all this horror going on around him, and he said, you know, the, it was so absurd. He didn’t want to kill Turks. He didn’t really think Turks wanted to kill him either. And what was this war about? What was it for? The First World War was such a stupid, stupid war. You know, it wasn’t like Second World War where there was appointed fighting it to defeat Hitler. First World War was all about nothing but greed, really. And he said no, he had this idea that everybody should, suddenly, in a moment, everybody should drop their guns, and everybody should make love to everybody else, regardless of race, regardless of age, regardless of gender. Everybody in the world should turn to everybody else, and they should all make love to one another. And this would bring warfare to an end. And it brings my lecture to an end as well. So I’m going to go into the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Carla. Train Bleu, the lamb. Train Bleu is a great experience. I really recommend it partly for the decor and the wonderful service. Food, mainly what French would call correct, not sensational. One thing that is really sensational there is the gigot d'agneau. I’ve never had lamb so delicious in my life.

Renee, the bellepop restaurants, Le Train Bleu, the blue train. And you’ll find it very easily on the internet.

Right, Harriet, I think I just sent you an email. You should have got it by now.

This is Sandy who lived in Cookham. Oh, you were there when he was still alive. Well, I’m sure, yes. He’s an artist, I’m desperately absent-minded myself, God, it’s an illness, so I identify with that side of him. His shading. Yes. Well, I mean it’s a drawing, isn’t it really? He, as I said, it’s very much a draughtsman, a drawing technique.

I did, of course, did you miss all that at the end talking about the strange sex life and the leg of mutton nude? Their husbands have been buried for centuries. And they’re popping out of their tombs. So they’re a bit dusty. So the wives have to dust them down.

Oh, do you find them depressing, Nana? I don’t find them depressing at all. I find them joyous paintings. And no, I think, Hilde, I don’t think she’s in that photograph of the students in the school. 'Cause I think she was a student a bit later.

Lucian Freud painted a nude self. Yes, well, Lucian Freud, I mean he hated to be compared to Stanley Spencer, if you really wanted to annoy him, just bring up the name of Stanley Spencer. But there are interesting comparisons, all the same. The property was, I think everything was taken over by Patricia, Stanley was left virtually penniless. And he really had to work desperately hard to earn money 'cause he then had to support his former wife and family, and his new wife and her lesbian lover.

Thank you, Vivian. Thank you. Monica.

Do I think he’s got, yes, I think there is a, Paula Rego, that would be an interesting comparison. I think they’re both artists who have a very special view of the world, and I think they’re both artists where their personal experience and childhood and so on infuses all their work. This is Milena who paired in Paris, 50 to 51. I’ve talked about Picasso quite a few times. There’s nothing planned in the near future. And I’m so glad you like him. Not everybody does. He is a bit of an amite artist. I I do know people who either can’t stand him or just not prepared to take him seriously.

So that seems to be everything. So, I’ll talk to you next time. I’m going back to London tomorrow, so I will next time talk to you from my house in London. Thank you everybody.