Stanley Spencer
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Sir Stanley Spencer, (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959), was an English painter.
Spencer was born and lived in the Thames-side village of Cookham in Berkshire, where the Methodist Chapel he attended is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery, a gallery dedicated to his art. His father was William Spencer, a music teacher.
He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at UCL London, from 1908 to 1912 under Henry Tonks and others; such was his attachment to his home that he commuted from Cookham to the Slade, earning thereby from other students the nickname "Cookham".
In 1914 Spencer began his service in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War. In 1916 he was sent out to Greece under the command of the 68th Field Ambulance unit. At the ending of the war in 1918 Spencer was asked to paint a work as a war artist for a Hall of Remembrance, a painting which was based on his own experiences and which became "Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916". Between the wars, Spencer received a lengthy commission to paint a large war memorial mural, which eventually included his "Resurrection of the Soldiers" altarpiece at the Sandham Memorial Chapel.
Spencer served as a War Artist in the Second World War, most famously depicting ship building on the Clyde. After the war ended in 1945, Spencer turned to more visionary work, as did many British neo-romantic painters and artists.
Spencer developed a naïve style, influenced in part by the colourful primitivism of Paul Gauguin. He held deep Christian beliefs, and many of his visionary works were religious in nature. Some, such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), set Biblical scenes in Cookham and depicted the villagers as characters from Scripture. His finest work, according to many critics, can now be seen at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere.
He was knighted in 1959. He died at Cliveden, Buckinghamshire in the same year.
In November 2006, the Imperial War Museum asked Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson to lead a campaign to fund restoration of Spencer's works focusing on the shipyards of Glasgow, and select other works including Cookham. Ferguson agreed, as his father, brother and an uncle had all worked in the yards at the time of Spencer's painting[1]
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His younger brother Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979) was also a talented painter of landscapes.
