Stanley Spencer Gallery

The Stanley Spencer Gallery is unique, being the only gallery in Britain devoted exclusively to an artist in the village where he was born and spent most of his life. Spencer was strongly influenced by the river and his religious beliefs, and the gallery occupies the former Victorian Methodist Chapel where Spencer was taken as a child to worship.

At the end of September 2007, a year after closing for an £800,000 total refurbishment, the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, reopened to the public.

The gallery opened in 1962 as a memorial to the artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who had been born and worked for much of his life in the village. He now has international stature and is widely recognised as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century.

Run entirely by volunteers, the gallery holds a fine collection of more than 120 works.

WINTER EXHIBITION

The Stanley Spencer Gallery winter opening hours are being extended from weekend opening only to four days a week, for the Winter Exhibition from Thursday to Sunday each week. The Winter Exhibition opens on November 5th 2009 until March 28th 2010. The exhibition includes 40 paintings and drawings by Stanley Spencer and a portrait of Stanley by Desmond Chute. The exhibition features a number of oils from the collection, as well as pictures on long-term loan.

Stanley’s talent as a portrait painter is exemplified in the Self-Portrait exhibited in the exhibition. Painted in oils in 1923 it is his second self-portrait in his fine series of self-portrait drawings and paintings, from c1913 until his death in 1959, Spencer was honest and uncompromising in recording the changes in his features as well as his feelings about himself. In addition to the formal self-portraits, he appears many times in his subject pictures as a small, boyish figure depicted in generalised terms, along with people who played a role in his real or imaginative life. This second self-portrait sold for 20 guineas in his highly successful, first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1927.

Nine of the works in the exhibition relate to Spencer’s army service, his years at Burghclere or his pictures in the Sandham Memorial Chapel, one of the most powerful and exceptional works of art to emerge from the Great War His friendship at Bristol with Desmond Chute was continued through Spencer’s letters (Stanley Spencer Gallery collection); in May 1916, Spencer wrote to Chute, ‘After breakfast cleaned up for parade at 8:30, paraded & then were told off to several large wagons which we began to shove & hawl [sic] along. It was perfect. I felt as if my soul would bust for joy. It is extraordinary how these experiences quicken my whole being.’

The Chapel itself, commissioned by the Behrends, commemorates his RAMC and infantry service in England and Macedonia during the war. Of direct relevance are his much-handled working drawings for the north and south walls (with additional details sketched in as he proceeded) and a drawing referring to his idea for ‘8 little pictures of incidents happening outside the door of a tent’. His years at Burghclere, painting in the Chapel, are also marked by his landscape of Beacon Hill and drawings of the maid Elsie, ‘When she was working for me at Burghclere our life was as light as the air.’