Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’
Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life. People remember that he loved bread and jam and was obsessed with rubbish, that his sexual compulsions drove him to divorce the love of his life and marry a man-hating and gold-digging tease, and amid all this detail the tremendous seriousness of his work can be lost.
Undoubtedly Spencer made art out of his life, which accounts for some fairly strange nudes and odd allegorical pictures, but his paintings and drawings must be seen as art and not literature. They are not diary entries but marvels of pen and brush. Spencer was a superb draughtsman, always preferring drawing to painting, considering the real work over when the compositional drawing was complete, and likening the addition of colour to knitting. This pen and ink ‘Study for Joachim among the Shepherds’ is in fact far more accomplished and pictorially interesting than the oil Spencer made from it in 1913. The best of his paintings, however, achieve a fully realised integration of paint and image, the paint bringing something to the iconography that drawing alone could not supply.
Here we have shepherds, a solitary sheep and the father of the Virgin Mary — not a bad start for a Christmas painting. I have chosen this beautiful drawing rather than, say, Spencer’s 1912 painting ‘The Nativity’, partly for its greater clarity and lucidity, but also because it stands slightly to one side, aslant from the Nativity theme.
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