Spencer, Stanley - Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene - art postcard

Art Postcard
• Work of art title: Rock Garden, Cookham Dene
• Artist (if known): Stanley Spencer
• Media or other details:  painter
• Publisher / Gallery: The Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp & postmark details (if relevant): na
• Size: modern
• Notes & condition details:

NOTES:

Size: 'Modern' is usually around 6in x 4in / 'Old Standard' is usually around 5 1/2in x 3 1/2in. Larger sizes mentioned, but if you need to know the exact size please ask.

All postcards are not totally new and are pre-owned. It's inevitable that older cards may show signs of ageing and use, particularly sent through the post. Any faults other than normal ageing are noted.

Stock No.: A610

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information:

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Sir Stanley Spencer KCB CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter.^[1] 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 Thames-side village where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as ""a village in Heaven"" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. 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 World War One memorial whilst the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.^[2]

Spencer's works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he based in Cookham which show the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents and also his romantic and sexual obsessions. Spencer's works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistic and experimental, whilst the nude works depicting his futile relationship with Patricia Preece, such as the Leg of mutton nude, foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud. Spencer's early work is regarded as a synthesis of French Post-Impressionism, exemplified for instance by Paul Gauguin, plus early Italian painting typified by Giotto. Whilst a student Spencer allied with a, short-lived, group who called themselves the ""Neo-Primitives"" which was centred on David Bomberg and William Roberts.^[3] In later life 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.^[4]

Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire, the eighth surviving child of William and Anna Caroline Spencer (née Slack).^[5] His father, usually known as Par, was a music teacher and church organist. Stanley's younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), also became a notable artist, known principally for his landscapes. The family home, ""Fernlea"", on Cookham High Street, had been built by Spencer's grandfather Julius Spencer. 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 took drawing lessons from a local artist, Dorothy Bailey. Eventually, Gilbert was sent to a school in Maidenhead, but the family did not feel this would be beneficial for Stanley, who was developing into a solitary teenager given to long walks, yet with a passion for drawing. 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 to attend Maidenhead Technical Institute, where his father insisted he should not take any exams.^[6]

From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London, under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg.^[6] So profound was his attachment to Cookham that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. It even became his nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself took to using for a time.^[6]

In 1912 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. The same year he painted The Nativity. for which he won a Slade Composition Prize. and he also began painting Apple Gatherers, which was shown in the first Contemporary Art Society exhibition the following year. In 1914 Spencer completed Zacharias and Elizabeth and The Centurion's Servant. The latter painting featured not only Spencer himself as the servant, but also his brothers and the bed from his own nursery.^[7] He also began work on a self-portrait. Self-portrait (1914) was painted in Wisteria Cottage, a decaying Georgian house Spencer rented from the local coalman in Cookham, for use as a studio. Painted with a mirror, the painting is bold and austere with a direct and penetrating gaze, softened by the deep shadow on the right hand side – the head fills the picture space and is painted one and a half times life size.^[8] Apple Gatherers had been bought by the artist Henry Lamb, who promptly sold it to the art collector Edward Marsh. Marsh later bought Self-portrait and considered it to be ""masterly...glowing with genius.""^[6]

At the start of World War One Spencer was keen to enlist but his mother persuaded him, given his poor physique, to apply for ambulance duties.^[9] In 1915 Spencer volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol, a large Victorian gothic building that had been a lunatic asylum.^[10] After thirteen months at Beaufort, the RAMC transferred Spencer to overseas duties. He 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.^[11] In 1917 he subsequently volunteered to be transferred to an infantry regiment, the 7th Battalion, the Berkshire Regiment. In all, Spencer spent two and a half years on the front line in Macedonia, facing both German and Bulgarian troops, before he was invalided out of the Army following persistent bouts of malaria.^[11] His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows, including his elder brother Sydney, in action in September 1918, indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations came through time and again in his subsequent works.

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.^[12] Swan Upping was first exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1920 and was bought by J.L.Behrend. 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. 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. Returning to the work Spencer found it difficult to continue after his war-time experiences, often stating ""It is not proper or sensible to expect to paint after such experience.""^[13][14]

In 1919 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. The resulting painting, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, now in the Imperial War Museum, was clearly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. He wrote,

""About the middle of September 1916 the 22nd Division made an attack on Machine Gun Hill on the Doiran Vardar Sector and held it for a few nights. During these nights the wounded passed through the dressing stations in a never-ending stream.""

The dressing station was an old Greek church which Spencer drew such that, with the animal and human onlookers surrounding it, it would recall depictions of the birth of Christ, but to Spencer the wounded figures on the stretchers spoke of Christ on the Cross while the lifesaving work of the surgeons represented the Resurrection. He wrote,

""I meant it not a scene of horror but a scene of redemption."" And also, ""One would have thought that the scene was a sordid one...but I felt there was grandeur...all those wounded men were calm and at peace with everything, so the pain seemed a small thing with them.""^[15][16]

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. Whilst there, he worked on a series of paintings for their private 'oratory'.^[6] In 1921 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.^[17] In 1923 Spencer spent the summer in Poole, Dorset, with Henry Lamb. Whilst there he worked on sketch designs for another possible war memorial scheme. These designs convinced two early patrons of Spencer's work, Louis and Mary Behrend, to commission a group of paintings as a memorial to Mary's brother, Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who had died in the war. The Behrends planned to build a chapel in the village of Burghclere in Berkshire to house the paintings. In 1925, Spencer married Hilda Carline, then a student at the Slade and the sister of the artists Richard and Sydney Carline. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930. In October 1923, Spencer started renting Henry Lamb's studio in Hampstead where he began work on The Resurrection, Cookham.

type=printed postcards

theme=artists signed

sub-theme=art

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted