Fifty years ago, the Stanley Spencer Gallery was founded in a converted Wesleyan Chapel by a group of local enthusiasts who wanted to celebrate the extraordinary achievement of Cookham’s most famous son. As Joan George recounts in her fascinating book, Stanley Spencer Remembered (Taderon Press, £6), at the gallery’s inauguration, Gilbert Spencer (Stan’s younger brother) quoted an inscription remembered from childhood on the chapel’s wall: ‘How amiable are thy tabernacles O Lord of Hosts.’ ‘Nowhere,’ declared Gilbert, ‘would its message be more appropriate than in this Gallery.’
Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is famous for his love of his home town, for his unconventional approach to intimate relationships, for his partiality to bread and jam and what other people saw as rubbish, and for painting some of the most original and uplifting human documents of the 20th century. It’s appropriate that his life and work should be commemorated in a chapel because Spencer’s vision of the world was imbued with spiritual fervour. His was not an ordinary Christian belief, but a personal interpretation of God’s teachings as addressed toS. Spencer Esq. As he said, ‘Somehow religion was something to do with me, and I was to do with religion. It came into my vision quite naturally, like the sky and the rain.’ Rarely has the traditional self-centredness of the artist achieved quite so sublime an expression.
But Spencer put his obsessions to great good use, painting the most marvellous series of murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere based on his experiences in the first world war (on being given the commission he is reputed to have said ‘What ho, Giotto!’), and producing a long stream of highly imaginative interpretations of the human (physical and spiritual) condition in the first half of the 20th century.
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