Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

John Donne Arriving in Heaven is a totality which celebrates the excitement Stanley feels in journeying towards a concept of joy he knows exists. But in detail he is still a novice struggling through music and literature to master truths which, if they ever come to him on earth, will do so only through time and experience.

CHAPTER FOUR

Apple Gatherers

All my life I have been impressed with the idea of emergence – a train coming out of a tunnel, for instance.

Stanley Spencer1

OUTSIDE COOKHAM – in London, at the Slade, in Taunton Stanley was the visitor, observing. But within Cookham he was emotionally the lover, absorbing: ‘I liked to take my thoughts for a walk and marry them to some place in Cookham,’2 he was to say years later of his adolescence. When the place in question became sufficiently ‘holy’, Stanley’s ‘marriage’ could be almost literal, as he confessed in 1912 to Gwen Darwin: ‘I never want to leave Cookham. … I have taken some compositions [drawings] to a little place I know’ – it was off Mill Lane – ‘and buried them in the earth there.’3 Gilbert remembered that Stanley had been reading Thomas Browne’s metaphysical Urn Burial. Stanley told Florence that he put his drawings into a tin ‘and while I go up and down to London, I often think of them. This is sentimental, but it does not matter. I shall go on being so. This is all very confidential, mind.’ It had to be so because his Slade fellow-students would have ragged him unmercifully had they known.

Gwen understood. Years later she too was to describe her own childhood feelings for, of all things, the cobbles of her grandfather Charles Darwin’s patio:

To us children everything at Down was perfect. … all the flowers that grew at Down were beautiful; and different from all other flowers. Everything was different. And better.

For instance, the path in front of the verandah was made of large round water-worn pebbles, from some beach. They were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and they were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean, literally adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes.4

At this probationary period in his creativity, Stanley was instinctively circumspect. Perhaps in his day and milieu there was less temptation than today to reject imbibed precepts. In any case, his innate caution would have inhibited rebellion. His mind worked associatively forward from received experience. Thus in disowning the ‘clammy atmosphere’ of his Methodist prayer-meeting he was not dismissing the basic assumptions of orthodox Christianity, but trying to reconcile them with some wider concept he was sensing. Such accretion of new experience to old expanded both. So the encompassing instinct implanted in him – the desire to absorb himself into the being of all around him – must be capable of such transcendence, and such was his approach to Apple Gatherers, painted during the Christmas – New Year vacation of 1911 – 12.5

The title had earlier been set as subject for a Slade Sketch Club competition and Stanley developed the painting from his drawing for the competition.* He began it at Fernlea, but when the house became crowded over Christmas, Gilbert records that he then used the empty Ship Inn, a cottage at the head of Mill Lane, once a tavern. Oddly enough, among the debris there were piles of stored apple trays. Sydney was fascinated to recount Stanley’s progress in his diary:

We had a kick or two with the football in Marsh Meadows and then went to Maidenhead to Miss Heybourne’s where Stan made purchases for his painting, I paying as his Christmas present. (2 January 1912)

Stan got on very well with his painting. The group seems to be more substantial, more at one with itself than it was. He has covered the neck of the lowest figure with a long curl which has redeemed the head to my fancy. (4 January 1912)

Stan is now engaged on the head of the chief woman figure in the painting. (5 January 1912)

Stan is now on the heads of the four men. He takes his own mouth in the mirror as a copy. Stan’s arm for the woman, too. (6 January 1912)

‘Stan’ was still working on it on 21 January, although by then it was nearing completion. Gilbert later asserted that Stanley painted it over a Resurrection he had done, and subsequent tests have substantiated that this must have been so.6

With so many of the Slade competitions being set on biblical themes, one might expect that the phrase ‘apple gatherers’ would bring to Stanley’s mind the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But, however associative the topic, Stanley had no wish to be so obvious in his rendering: ‘there is no symbolic meaning whatever intended in The Apple Gatherers, and I cannot account for the fact that I have divided the sexes in the picture.’7 No Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden, no biblical literalness. The Bible was allegory of great truth, but Cookham too was such a book if its pages were read with vision. Adam and Eve, the male and female in Creation, the apple, the seed. If the questioning of God and man’s subsequent disobedience led to knowledge of good and evil and a feeling of estrangement from God expressed in prudery, could it not be that the purpose of sexuality was to bring humanity back to God? When all Stanley’s Cookham-feelings drove him to that conclusion, how could he use traditional imagery? He would trust his own feelings: were they too not God-given?

From a place in Cookham he would personify his feelings, embody them in visual manifestation: ‘I wanted to see the beings that certain places would of their own spiritual essence bring forth. … I wanted the persons in the picture to continue without interruption what the place had begun in my mind and for them to be the material outcome of the place.’8 The place he chose was ‘a place on Odney Common where looking towards a grassy bank towards Mill Lane I had the feeling for that picture’. The spot had no orchard, so it ‘was not in my picture at all; it was the place I thought about because it seemed to bring the thought of this picture in my mind. It helped me to the frame of mind to produce this idea.’

Stanley simply transferred the place-feeling, as he had done with the river bank and Widbrook Common in John Donne Arriving in Heaven, to a known orchard, in this case one which grew in a garden beyond Fernlea, and painted that. Such transferences of associated feelings characterize all Stanley’s work. Again it is the emotion which he wished to universalize: ‘It is significant to me that in my early religious pictures done at a time when I was innocent I wanted to include in the concept the idea of men and women. I think the Apple Gatherers does say something of the fact of men and women, something that does go past and beyond the usual conceptions to whatever the relationship is.’9

The figures in the painting are not merely expressing a discovery of erotic awareness. They are expressing Stanley’s nascent comprehension that the purpose of the representation of males and females in his painting would be to come together in ‘fusion’, and thereby to celebrate the unity which was beginning to mean for Stanley an unfolding of the ‘identity’ of God. Why God should appear in disparate form as male and female was to Stanley a mystery. He could not accept that any division was connected with concepts of guilt or sin or punishment or banishment or the wrath of God.* To Stanley the miracle was that our instincts impel us to attempt a reconstitution of the original and ultimate unity, the Alpha and Omega. No wonder the figures in his painting are hesitant! They are being born of Creation. They see God.

In a letter of the time to his fellow-student Jacques Raverat, Stanley told him that Apple Gatherers was as significant in his thinking as Jacques’ own painting The Dancers was in his. Jacques Raverat, six years older than Stanley, was the son of a French businessman at Le Havre who combined intellectualism with a worthy propensity for making money. The latter gained him an elegant estate in Burgundy, the Château de Vienne at Prunoy; the former persuaded him to send Jacques for a liberal English education at the progressive Bedales School near Petersfield. First at the Sorbonne and then at Cambridge Jacques read mathematics, became a stalwart of the Rupert Brooke circle, and met Gwen Darwin. Gwen’s interest in art led her determinedly to the Slade in 1908 in the same student intake, as we have seen, as Stanley. A recurring illness first manifest in 1907 persuaded Jacques that his true interest also lay in art, and in the spring of 1910 he too joined the Slade. While there he and Gwen married in June 1911. Perhaps Stanley had been a little adoring of Jacques’ bride:

C-o-n-g-r-a-t-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s! As soon as you have more babies than you want, you might give me one. Must have a wife before you can have a baby. Rotten, I call it. I used to have to eat my bread and butter before I could have my cake. Same thing. I don’t think there is any just cause or impediment why you two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, but you might have let me know earlier. My God, if I’d heard the banns …!10

Honeymooning in France, they sent him a ‘having-a-marvellous-time-hope-to-see-you-soon’ postcard.*11

Unlike the free wild creatures of Jacques’ The Dancers, leaping Matisse-like on some ethereal shore, the figures of Stanley’s painting are contemplative, tremulous. Like Stanley himself, the figures stand on the threshold of a wild discovery and are amazed.* When the painting was later exhibited, Stanley was disconcerted to find its theme interpreted as a portrayal of sexual attraction. But to him this was neither its prime intent nor an aspect he wished emphasized. He wanted to ‘go past and beyond usual conceptions’. Why then, his critics argued, show the sexes separate? Again Stanley was baffled. He could ‘not account for the fact that I have divided the sexes in the picture.’ Of course he could not. If he showed them separate, that was because they were posed in the only way he could as yet manage; for in the sublimity to which he aspired he had as yet no experience of the sexual ‘fusion’ whose meaning he was struggling to understand. If his admirers could not grasp from his painting what he was trying to say, then there was little he could do to help them: ‘I feel rather like the young man who when he thinks his girl is admiring his thoughts and ideas and feelings finds that it is the way his hair curls which is the real attraction.’14

But to those like the Raverats who genuinely understood, Stanley’s joy in his painting was incontestable:

The picture was the first ambitious work, and I have in it wished to say what life was. … I felt a need for my religious experience expressed in earlier paintings to include all that was a happy experience for me. One can’t, I know, make endearing remarks to a canvas before you begin to paint on it, but I felt I could kiss the canvas all over just as I began to paint my apple picture on it.15

CHAPTER FIVE

The Nativity

Study me then you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring,

For I am every dead thing

In whom Love wrought new Alchemy.

John Donne: Poems1

ONCE POSSESSED of an overpowering idea, Stanley would all his life tenaciously worry its development through a succession of paintings. The desperate desire to resolve the paradox of duality became spiritual in Apple Gatherers. In The Nativity, also painted in 1912, the longing became religious.

If from the title we expect a conventional interpretation, we shall be surprised. Stanley is a will-o’-the-wisp who leads us unsuspectingly into what we think is familiar territory only, Puck-like, magically to change our surroundings, so that we stand bewildered, disturbed, abandoned, even resentful, according to our preconceptions.

What is it in his painting which so suddenly changes terrain we thought we knew? It is his composition, the transformation of content into visual presentation, which disorientates us, so that only slowly and perhaps incredulously do we begin to find our bearings. Many, in Stanley’s day, never found them, and simply relished the surprise. The message, to his chagrin, was all too often dismissed or devalued.

In his Nativity, the three Wise Men have come to visit. They are presented thus in a preliminary drawing. But now two of the Magi have become, surprisingly, the males of two pairs of lovers who meet as the emotional focus of the composition. The third remains a kneeling worshipper. The lovers are absorbed in each other and are oblivious to the presence of the Holy Family. This is not unexpected in view of the fact that Stanley intended the Holy Family to be not a tangible presence in Mill Lane, but visual imagery to convey his awed sense of sanctified discovery. Joseph, the figure on the right of the painting, is portrayed not in the manner of most traditional Nativities as the remarried widower of legend, an old man past sexual capability, but as a virile and romantic young man in a blue Botticelli robe, ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’.*

Despite this, the tree is in blossom, not fruit. The imagery is of the new life of spring; hardly relevant to a traditional Christmas scene. Precisely what Joseph is doing to the chestnut tree is left to conjecture, but his young thoughts are perhaps linked imaginatively to the erect chestnut candles with which it is girdled. Contrary to orthodox religious interpretations, it is suggested that he has every reason to be suffering sexual frustration. Mary, although a mother and his wife, is still a virgin. God has chosen her over Joseph’s head to become the link with the coming of creativity, a prodigious role in which he, Joseph – Stanley – has as yet no part.

Joseph is thus separated from Mary, who stands full in the centre of the painting, large, sombre-robed, almost masculine in appearance. Amy Hatch, another ‘cousin’ of Stanley’s, posed for her. She must, like Dorothy Wooster, have been a sturdy girl. ‘Monumental’ is Stanley’s own adjective for her in the painting, meaning that like a monument in a public place she is unnoticed by those who pass preoccupied. A miracle has been bestowed on her. Its physical form lies in the crib at her feet, added according to Stanley as ‘an afterthought’. For of course her concern in Stanley’s presentation is not so much with the child as with the wider meaning of creation, that which lies beyond the fence, the world where flesh-and-blood lovers meet in mutual delight. A separation – that of unfulfilment – exists between Mary and her spouse, and there is a division – the fence, the barrier of inaccessibility – between them as spiritual manifestations and the real world. Florence wrote:

neither is it strange that the grandchildren of a builder who was also a fine musician should have been consciously or subconsciously interested in the structural significance of walls and fugues. Cowls, walls and railings have from the first, I think, provided the fugue subjects of many of their works; the cowls, walls and railings which absently focussed our attention as children and about which as children our first thoughts and impressions played.5

Like Mary in the painting, Stanley is gazing in wonder and longing at those who are about to enter a comprehension of the renewal of creation as experienced on earth. Indeed, the pairs of lovers may be drawn from Stanley’s feelings when Will or Harold or Florence married; the emotional amputation of departing siblings is a common enough experience in families. Rapt in the adoration of their beloveds, the Wise Men who came to see the birth of God have in that miracle become themselves part of the perennial birth of God, and advance to affirm the universal sacrament of life. Beyond them, in the background field, sheaves of corn seem stooked at harvest. Beyond again are the trees of Cliveden Woods, some of which seem to be turning into autumn brown. Perspective has become a series of compositional waves. Each wave is a season. A fourth dimension has been added to the canvas. Time itself has been compressed.

The secret of the painting stands revealed. It is a hymn to fecundity, to the compulsion and universality of the sexual instinct in its broadest concept, to that miraculousness of the process of creation which humanity has always seen as holy. Mary and Joseph are not simplistically the figures of accepted recognition, nor are the pairs of lovers those of poetic romance. The whole must be God. Mary and Joseph are primal figures dressed in Christian symbolism whose profoundest meanings go back beyond their own time, past the known gods of old, back to our earliest awareness of the sources of our existence and our survival.

The figures in Stanley’s paintings are symbols of our primeval consciousness, of the thrust of male fertility and of the protectiveness of female parturition; the duality of fecundity. In his struggle to understand, Stanley is returning to a literal beginning, to the implications of his earlier reading, for example, of The Golden Bough, to the ‘embryonic fish’ of his contemporary Wyndham Lewis, to the understanding which was to obsess another young genius of his generation, D. H. Lawrence, however differently expressed. In the painting, Stanley tells us, Mary and Joseph are ‘related in some sacramental ordinance’. It is as yet beyond his comprehension. Stanley is still physically Joseph, virginal, restricted in experience to ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’. Yet in some spiritual sense, glimpsed if unrealized, he is also Mary, the mother who is fulfilled in that ultimate act of creation, the birth of God. Stanley’s inability to resolve the dichotomy troubles him. He is as yet a child in comprehension, relegated to a crib (an ‘afterthought’) at the feet of the majesty of creation. ‘The painting’, wrote Stanley, ‘celebrates my marriage to the Cookham wildflowers.’6

There were some who glimpsed his meaning, but few who might have felt the power of what he was trying to say, and fewer still who would have sympathized. To the devout of the day he was toying dangerously with the pagan sources of Christianity. Yet to him the apparent unchangingness of Cookham was becoming revealed as the everlasting rhythm of the mystery of death and rebirth, of the miracle of the emergence of exquisite form from meaningless chaos, of the marvel of that gift given him to fashion into art – into ‘compositions’ – the random chess or domino or draughts pieces which the world of the senses emptied into his brain. The same forces which compelled Cookham into the renewal of spring were those which moved his hands into creativity and his spirit into ecstasy. He and Cookham were united by that force, ‘married’, so that creation – birth – emerged from disorder – death – in each.

Spanning the two was the seed. In front of the kneeling Wise Man in The Nativity a plant grows, its pattern boldly shadowing him to draw our attention to it. It is apparently a sunflower, that traditional symbol which will appear in future paintings of Stanley’s as the promise of seedburst to come. As Stanley wandered enraptured among the wildflowers of the Cookham water-meadows, blossoming then in uncontrolled profusion, he was overcome not only by an aesthetic beauty he would glorify in later landscapes and still-lifes, but by an awe of their greater role as silent witnesses to the compulsion of fecundity. Like a woman adorned for her lover, each flower flaunted its beauty as sexual invitation, honouring its instinctive purpose as the provider of the seed for future life. The seed was in Stanley himself too, as it was in all animate things, in the men, women, girls, babies, trees, flowers, corn, lambs or beehives of his early compositions. As an animate thing it had been nurtured into existence through what scientifically might be called a ‘conducive environment’, but which to Stanley was the protection, the security, the peace, the ‘cosiness’ of its ‘home’. Thereby it had been brought to its power of fertilization, the token of an ultimate fulfilment dedicated beyond any urge of immediate satisfaction to the compulsion of rebirth, the cosmic coming-together of male and female elements, the drive of creation. That above all was inevitable and holy, and each of us is a priest in worship. It is surely no coincidence that most of Stanley’s early paintings are set in spring or summer, and show meetings, conjoinings or emergences. The exhortations of John Ruskin have Stanley as firmly in their grip as earlier they had held Proust and Tolstoy.*

Stanley’s painting won the Summer Picture Figure Composition Prize of £25 which was shared with a fellow-student. It still hangs today in University College, London.

CHAPTER SIX

Self-Portrait, 1914

All original artists, I am certain, have always worked without reference to their work’s effect on spectators other than themselves; and they have always assumed that their work has intrinsic value when they themselves have honestly and competently passed it as exactly the thing which they had set out to do.

R. H. Wilenski: Preface to The Modern Movement in Art, 19271

I have just bought Cookham’s great picture of the Apple Gatherers. I can’t bring myself to acquiesce in the false proportions, although in every other respect I think it’s magnificent. I’ve made great friends with him, I went down to the place Cookham two Sundays ago and spent the afternoon in the pullulating bosom of his family. There are too many of them, six out of nine were there, beside the parent-birds, and they are very gregarious, so I never got Stanley to myself; but it was an amusing experience.2

THE LETTER-WRITER was Edward Marsh, scholar, wit, man-about-town, patron of up-coming artists and poets, and at the time private secretary to Winston Churchill. The letter was to Rupert Brooke, then (1913) travelling in America and the Pacific:

The father is a remarkable old man still in his early middle age at about 70 – very clever but – I beg his pardon, I mean ‘and’ – a tremendous talker, and frightfully pleased with himself, his paternity, his bicycling, his opinions, his knowledge, his ignorance – due to the limitations of his fatherhood of nine – his radicalism and everything that is his. … Gilbert is an artist too but only six months since. Stan had only about two things to show, he does work slowly.

Until the 1910 and 1912 London exhibitions of post-impressionist paintings, picture collecting had been largely confined to the purchase of traditional Victorian themes or the resale of Old Masters. But now a fashionable interest was developing among progressive connoisseurs in acquiring the work of young British painters, an interest encouraged by the more enlightened London galleries, by the formation of new groups of artists such as the London Group or the New English Art Club, and by the coming together in loose assemblies of intellectuals and aesthetes. Such an assembly was the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, one venue for which was the Bedford Square home of the startling Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Contemporary Arts Society, formed by Lady Ottoline and Roger Fry in 1910 to acquire the work of up-and-coming artists for national collections, was a product of the new outlook.

Not all the collectors were wealthy enough to indulge their enthusiasm at will. Some, like the ‘prodigal collector’ Michael Sadler, who had been Steward of Christ Church, Oxford, in the days when the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – had been a tiresome Curator of the Common Room, and who was now Chancellor of Leeds University, had to restrict their collecting to the use of such cash as they could raise extra to their emoluments. Edward Marsh was one of these. Although not at all wealthy, he was the recipient in addition to his salary of a fossil pension which had unexpectedly descended to him from a ‘mad aunt’ and which was paid periodically on account of a distant forebear, the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1812. This surprising bounty was used by Marsh to buy paintings, originally the conventional old masters, but now from ‘all those bloody artists’ as Rupert Brooke described them.*