Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

Stanley was encouraged to display Apple Gatherers at the Contemporary Arts Society’s summer exhibition of 1913 at the Goupil Galleries – the galleries in which the young Vincent van Gogh had once worked as an assistant. The significance of the painting was quickly spotted. Among the visitors was the painter Henry Lamb, then twenty-eight or so, who wrote to congratulate Stanley. The Gauguinesque influence in the painting appealed to Lamb, whose own work, particularly of Breton fisher-folk, was perhaps similar in style. He was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group at the time that Clive Bell was acting as buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society. Lamb and others confidently expected that Bell would agree to the purchase of Stanley’s painting for £100, wealth to the young artist. But Bell, obsessed with his art theories, vetoed the purchase.* There was consternation at the decision, and Lamb was so incensed on Stanley’s behalf that although by then painting in the west of Ireland he wrote to offer £30. Sydney recounts in his diary the family delight: ‘Stan corroborated the happy news that Florence brought me last night. He has had an offer of £30 for his picture the Apple Gatherers from a Mr Lamb. I am so glad about this.’4

Stanley had not yet met Lamb and knew little of him or the intrigues about the painting. So he not unnaturally assumed that Lamb had offered the £30 because he admired the painting; which he did, but this was not the reason for the offer. Lamb felt that an injustice had been done to a young and worthwhile painter. Although he could ill afford the £30, he ventured on the purchase because he was convinced he could resell the painting at a higher price and thereby blaze abroad the obtuseness of a self-appointed arbiter of taste. In much the same way he had taken up public cudgels the previous year in a battle with French officialdom to support young Jacob Epstein’s controversial tomb in Paris of Oscar Wilde.

Stanley delivered the canvas on 3 November to Lamb’s London studio at the Vale of Health Hotel, characteristically insisting on precise details of how to get there.5 The Vale of Health had been developed in a restful hollow of Hampstead Heath – Leigh Hunt had once lived there and the young Keats wrote poetry there – and the subsequent hotel included artists’ studios arranged in pairs each side of a central staircase. Lamb’s was on the third floor. Outside, lawn terraces overlooked the Heath and a small lake, a scene which forms the view through the window in Lamb’s celebrated portrait of Lytton Strachey.6 However, it was not long before Londoners discovered the hotel’s position on the edge of ‘Appy ‘Ampstead ‘Eath and turned it into a holiday pub with a funfair adjacent and drunken fighting at closing time.

None of this troubled the steely and imperturbable Lamb, who reported to friends his first meeting with Stanley with a mixture of amusement and astonishment. As Lamb took Stanley that afternoon round the galleries of London, he who had spent years in France worshipping in the studios of painters he admired, suddenly found himself elevated to the status of a respected guru. They called at the imposing Chelsea home of Darsie Japp, who had overlapped with Stanley at the Slade in 1908 – 9 and who had already bought his Two Girls and a Beehive.7 Stanley was awed by Japp’s background, prosperity and savoir-faire. To him Japp, like Lamb, ‘knew everything’.

A bemused Lamb sent Apple Gatherers to Michael Sadler in Leeds, suggesting £60 and assuring Stanley that he would give him the extra. Stanley, who had accepted with equanimity the rejection of the painting, was surprised and gratified, and told the Raverats: ‘Lamb has sent the preliminary payment of £30. If he has to sell it – and he thinks he will – any profit he makes by so doing he will give me. He is very good. He said: “What can you expect from these fashion-mongers?” But I do not altogether blame the Society.’8

Worried that it was lack of ready cash which was preventing Lamb from being able to retain a painting he admired, Stanley courteously told Lamb in his quaint ‘business-letter’ style:

I feel crossed [pulled in two directions] about that picture because all the time I am wanting money I am wanting you to keep the picture. You understand I can wait. You see, for another year or so I shall not be having to spend a lot – I seldom do – and if I live as I have been doing until now I shall be able to get through without danger. I tell you that I do not worry about money but I [have to] think about it.9

Sadler was prepared to offer only fifty guineas, a sum he had recently received for some extra-mural work. But in the meantime Edward Marsh had come forward as a bidder. At the instigation of Mark Gertler he had been keen to acquire a Stanley Spencer work. Apple Gatherers was in his sights when Stanley and Gertler fell out over their opinions of Cézanne. Marsh felt he could not offend Gertler, whose work he equally admired, and had tactfully to wait until the tiff exhausted itself. He then invited Stanley to spend a weekend at his apartment in Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Stanley was impressed: ‘I spent a weekend with Eddie Marsh. I had Darsie Japp and Gaudier [Brzeska] for dinner one day and Gertler and a man named Nash* the next. … Marsh took me to tea at a Miss Nesbitt’s; the elder of the two Miss Nesbitts is very nice. She is an actress and she seems to be so unlike what I imagined an actress to be.’10 Cathleen Nesbitt was then on the threshold of her long and distinguished stage career. She was deeply in love with Rupert Brooke.

It must have been on that occasion that Marsh ventured to Stanley his wish to purchase Apple Gatherers. Like Sadler, he could not offer more than fifty guineas and Stanley would have to wait for payment until the next allocation of the Perceval pension. Stanley reported the offer to Lamb. He let Stanley decide. Stanley chose Marsh.†

The deal was completed in December. Marsh hung the painting in the small guest bedroom of his flat. It joined his embryo collection of contemporary artists – Augustus John, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler – among his considerable collection of quiet eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works. Seeing them there Paul Nash commented: ‘Apparently there has been a recent phase among the English progressives which might be called “The Apotheosis of the Dwarf”. Groups of dwarves by Gertler and Spencer seemed to menace me from every wall.”14 Rupert Brooke, returning from Tahiti in June of 1914 and staying in the guest room, promptly christened the painting ‘the Bogeys’. This, thought Marsh, deflated, was ‘a disappointing reaction’.15

But for Stanley these were halcyon years of both hope and accomplishment. He remained at Fernlea but acquired a ‘studio’, Wistaria Cottage, a then empty Georgian house at the east end of the High Street in need of structural repair. He rented it from his cousins the Hatches for eighteen pence a week, and liked it for the quiet and for the light from the east-facing rear windows which overlooked the extensive gardens of St George’s Lodge as they sweep down to a branch of the Thames at Odney Common, a location in which he was to set his Zacharias and Elizabeth (1913–14).

The family visited frequently. Will would come over from Cologne in the summer breaks while Johanna joined her family in Berlin. Harold and his wife Natalie – a dancer from Gibraltar were occupied in light orchestral work, abundant then. Horace’s conjuring took him on music-hall engagements at home and overseas. Annie remained reluctantly but dutifully at Fernlea, taking charge of a succession of live-in maids or domestics, for Ma was now confined at times to a bathchair which Stanley would cheerfully push the three miles or so into Maidenhead and back. Florence had married a Cambridge don, J. M. Image, brother to Selwyn Image, Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and an expert on stained glass. Sydney, having worked like a Trojan to matriculate, was overwhelmed by the delights of scholarship, for he had been accepted as a divinity student at Oxford. Percy remained an administrator with his London building firm, and kept a fraternal eye on Gilbert, who was starting his Slade course and, like Sydney, back at Fernlea in vacations.

Stanley’s acquaintance with Henry Lamb continued: ‘I have seen a lot of Lamb recently when I was having my teeth done a few weeks ago. … He had me at his place and he played me – God alone knows what he didn’t play me. I went there twice, and he did heaps of Beethoven, the Diabelli Variations. I was glad to hear a lot of Mozart16 [with J. S. Bach, Stanley’s favourite composer]. His playing is very good; he gets everything clear.’ ‘Getting everything clear’ – vital to Stanley, in music, in literature, in art, in vision.

Both Gilbert and Stanley were attracting the attention of cognoscenti. Several brought excitement into the lives of Ma and Pa by asking if they could call to see the artists at work. Edward Marsh was followed by Henry Lamb, who during a stay at Marlow walked over to Cookham in March of 1914 and for the first time saw Stanley on his home ground. On 30 May of that long hot summer he was in Cookham again on a ramble with Percy, Gilbert and Stanley, during which Percy took them birdwatching, and ‘told the tale of the birds’. During the visit Gilbert showed him his final painting in a trio he called The Seven Ages of Man. Lamb was so impressed that he submitted it on Gilbert’s behalf to the Contemporary Arts Society. It was Lady Ottoline Morrell’s turn to act as buyer. To the family’s joy she chose it in June for purchase at £100.* Thus Gilbert achieved the success so narrowly denied Stanley. Lamb promptly wrote to Gilbert to warn him that at their next meeting the drinks were on him.

Intrigued to meet the brothers, Ottoline herself came with her husband the Liberal MP, Philip Morrell, by train in July for tea at Fernlea and a walk along the Thames with the family. Stanley had just finished his first oil self-portrait, in which he painted himself in a mirror tilted to see part of the ceiling. The effect is to emphasize the jaw and mouth. Did the Morrells, one wonders, sense that in the set of the face and the quest of the eyes, the owner was beginning to see visions denied to many?†

During the visit there was, according to Sydney, ‘keen discussion’ of Mozart’s music, and ‘much fun’ over the taking of group photographs, Ottoline being an enthusiastic photographer. The Morrells stunned the Spencers by airily hailing a local taxi for the return journey. A few weeks later Ottoline, having been offered the use of Lady Ripon’s box at Covent Garden, reciprocated by inviting the Spencers to a Mozart opera. Evening dress was required. Ma was no problem, and Pa had an aged dress suit. Ottoline arranged for Gilbert to be pinned into one of Philip’s, while Stanley disappeared into Edward Marsh’s, which he had lent for the purpose. The procession of the party into the opera-house was a spectacle long-remembered with hilarity by the participants.

Darsie Japp was another welcomed visitor. He had previously visited, and walked ‘twenty miles into Buckinghamshire’ with Stanley; the Thames at Cookham forms a boundary between Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. On their return to Fernlea they were given boiled eggs for tea by Ma, a simple fare which Japp enjoyed, for, he told Stanley, ‘I shall have plovers’ eggs tonight.’22 In August Henry Lamb visited again. Will was there from Germany. Sydney captures in his diary for August the echoes of that last summer before the impact of war: ‘Yesterday Henry Lamb came down and spent some hours with us. We walked to Odney, then to Cliveden. … Suddenly we all concluded we wanted to bathe. So Gil fetched towels and Guy Lacey came with us. The water was delicious. Coming home, Lamb begged Will to play the Hammerklavier Sonata.’

Significant though music was to both Henry Lamb and Stanley, it was a mutual recognition of the importance of art which drew together in friendship this otherwise contrasting pair. For all his more worldly literacy, savoir-faire and sophistication, Lamb seems to have shared with Stanley those moments of self-doubt, even of despair, which all artists suffer. But whereas Lamb’s bouts of despondency would become prolonged, Stanley’s natural buoyancy would quickly lift him to the surface. Perhaps Lamb occasionally needed the help of such optimism from his new friend. Eight years older than Stanley, he was a son of Horace Lamb, a distinguished professor of mathematics, later knighted. He had almost completed the medical course intended for him when he suddenly abandoned it, married the notoriously sensual model Nina Forrest, his ‘Euphemia’ – it was said to be a forced marriage – and went to Paris to study art, particularly under Augustus John. There his marriage disintegrated. He returned to England in 1911 to help extricate John from a relationship with Ottoline Morrell which was becoming tiresome. A slim, pale man, according to Lady Ottoline he was as fascinating to women as he was attracted to them. But essentially he was a man of wide cultural, social, musical and artistic sensibilities. He and Stanley shared an honesty of purpose and a clarity of outlook which all their lives resented pretension. When they met it, their reactions differed. Where Stanley would rant or grumble in protest, Lamb would pick up his lance and charge. The jousting blow he delivered to Clive Bell over the Apple Gatherers affair was not mortal, but at least gave him the satisfaction of displaying his contempt. Neither he nor Stanley was greatly interested in material possession, nor in money save as the means to artistic freedom. But both remained in thrall, despite all obstacles, to the ‘divine fire’.

Artistically, Stanley’s prospects were encouraging. His work was increasingly recognized among connoisseurs, even if not always for the reasons he intended. Materially, it sold. By 1914 he told Gwen: ‘I have £52 in the bank and I think I shall take the money I have in the Post Office Savings bank and make a deposit account at the London County & Westminster Bank where I already have a current account. I think you get 4 per cent interest.’23 He also asks Gwen’s advice on whether he should increase his contribution to the family housekeeping; he was paying his mother £1 a month, perhaps £10 a week now. Interesting projects were in the offing. In 1913 Jacques and Gwen Raverat had made moves to get Stanley and Eric Gill involved in illustrating and lettering a version of the four gospels. Gill, however, declined the project as too onerous, and the Raverats, it seems, were modifying it to discussions of an illustrated version of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with drawings by Stanley, woodcuts by Gwen, layout by Jacques and lettering by Gill. Rupert Brooke was urging Edward Marsh to promote a theatrical venture with text by himself, scenery by Stanley, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the leading actress.24 Marsh had already in 1912 published the first of the anthologies of contemporary verse he called Georgian Poets. Stanley enjoyed the volume – ‘Marsh gave me a book of English poets. I like Rupert Brooke because he knows what teatime is’25 – and suggested a companion series of ‘Georgian painters’ to include Gertler, Currie, Nash, the Spencers, Seabrooke, Roberts, Rosenberg, Nevinson, Wadsworth and Gaudier-Brzeska. In addition Stanley was diverting Jacques Raverat’s aborted four gospels project towards an associated scheme which was gradually to assume dominance for him in later life: the building of a long gallery – ‘chapel’ – in which the artists’ paintings would illustrate the Life of Christ in terms of their own developing experiences through life.

But all were to come to naught. The times were too troubled. Rupert Brooke, due with Jacques Raverat to join friends on a camping holiday at Helston in Cornwall, sends Stanley (‘Dear Cookham’) a letter which sums up the feelings of the perplexed young men:

I wish I knew about painting. I’ve left Raymond Buildings for months. I don’t know when I shall be back. I’m glad I was there when you came. I’m going sailing and walking with Jacques for ten days or so. At least I want to. But this damned war business. … If fighting starts I shall have to enlist or go as a correspondent, I don’t know. It will be Hell to be out of it; and Hell to be in it. I’m so depressed about the war that I can’t talk, think or write coherently. God be with you.26

He never made his trip to Cornwall.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Centurion’s Servant

Here we part with the year 1913 which has had many joys for me and few sorrows. What has 1914 got locked up in its bosom for me and mine? We shall see in time.

Sydney Spencer, 31 December 19131

TUESDAY 4 AUGUST 1914 was Florence’s birthday. She had come to Cookham to enjoy a celebration party at Fernlea. During the afternoon, Herbert Henry Asquith, long-serving Prime Minister in the Liberal Government, announced in the House of Commons the delivery of an ultimatum to Germany demanding the withdrawal of her troops from Belgium, to whose neutrality Britain was committed. Florence had cause to remember that day:

On the afternoon of August 4th – my birthday – 1914 I was pacing the Causeway at Cookham with my brother Percy, gravely discussing with him the family scene, when he said: ‘Of course, I shall have to go.’ ‘Not you!’ I cried sharply. ‘A family of seven sons’, he replied, ‘could not stand aside, and if I went, perhaps the younger sons will not have to go.’ I listened dumb-stricken …2

The ultimatum expired at midnight. There was, as expected, no response. On Wednesday the 5th, the recruiting offices opened.

Joining the forces was voluntary. The older married brothers, pianist Will and violinist Harold, seemed unlikely to be affected, except that Will now found himself trapped in England, his wife Johanna in Germany. In the patriotic fervour which swept the nation, Sydney in Oxford dismayed his parents by joining the Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet. The rolling-stone brother Horace was trying to get home from West Africa, having suffered a shipwreck from which he escaped with his life only because he was a strong swimmer. Percy stuck to his resolve and joined the Warwickshire Regiment.

Henry Lamb put his medical training to use by becoming a volunteer dresser in a private military hospital in France. Darsie Japp, an excellent horseman, was proposed for a commission in the Royal Artillery; field guns were still pulled by teams of horses. Rupert Brooke joined Churchill’s recently formed Naval Division – a forerunner of today’s Marine Commandos – as a platoon commander. Gaudier-Brzeska went back to France to join his infantry regiment. Jacques Raverat too crossed over to France and was both chagrined and alarmed to be rejected for military service as medically unfit.

Stanley, like most young men then, had no idea of the meaning of warfare and was attracted to the notion of joining the Royal Berkshires as an infantryman. But it is unlikely that he would have been accepted, on account of his slight stature; he was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 6 stone 12 pounds. In those early days of the war, recruiting followed peacetime standards and the minimum requirements for infantrymen precluded Stanley. However, he and Gilbert compromised by joining the Maidenhead branch of the Civic Guard, an unauthorized but encouraged pre-recruitment training organization, the activities of which consisted mostly of marching and drill. Such team activity required a suppression of self to corporate perfection which appealed to the metaphysical in Stanley, and with the rest of the Cookham contingent he would return at night exhausted but exhilarated. He and Gilbert also joined the Bray brigade of the St John’s Ambulance Corps. Provided they could acquire the First Aid Certificate, they would be eligible to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as medical orderlies in the Home Hospital Service, the only basis on which Pa and Ma would consider letting them go.

But if such was their outward behaviour, internally the shock reverberated. It was not so much the danger of going to war which troubled Stanley, for he was seldom concerned for his physical circumstance. Rather it was the spiritual dilemma which disturbed him; the question whether he should offer up his painting, his creative destiny, to the unheeding Behemoth of military service which had no need for it. If he joined up, would he, in his words, ‘commit a sin against the Holy Ghost’?

It is possible to deduce several hints in Stanley’s work during 1914 of the seriousness to him of his perplexity. In The Betrayal, painted in that year, Stanley used St Mark’s account of the arrest of Christ in which a young man who ‘lay hold on Christ’ – Stanley shows him holding Christ’s hand – is so startled by the violence of the proceedings that he tears himself from Christ’s clasp, loses his robe in his haste, and flees from the scene naked. Stanley set the main figures in the back garden of Fernlea against a black wall and makes the young man pale in tone, so that he glows white. So intensely did Stanley feel about the painting that he sent the Raverats an annotated sketch. Even after the painting was finished, he continued to be preoccupied with the theme and made a subsequent pencil-and-wash study in which the wall is rendered lighter in tone. Against it he inserted another of his pronounced shadows; it is that of the young man fleeing, and emphasizes his being torn from the handhold of Christ. That the subject reflects Stanley’s disturbed feelings about the war is apparent from the unusual way he has in the study shown Peter drawing his sword to strike off the ear of the High Priest’s bailiff. The scabbard has been rotated until it points upwards. He later told a confidante that he based the image on the army drill for unsheathing a bayonet; this was to rotate the scabbard in its belt-holder or ‘frog’ and withdraw the bayonet downwards, a drill he must have learned from his Civic Guard training and incorporated into the study.

Stanley is surely indicating that he sees himself, like the young companion of Christ in the Bible version, as forced to flee naked from the handholder of his creativity. He is in shock, being compelled to betray his destiny. In a letter to Gwen Raverat he desperately asks her: ‘What ought Gilbert and I to do in this war? My conscience is giving me no peace … advice from you would greatly relieve me, even if you said I ought to go to the Front. … I have been so disturbed that I have not been able to concentrate.’3 Sydney, at home for the Christmas vacation of 1914, records in his diary the unusual fact that ‘Stan made a bad bed companion last night, he kept rolling over and pulling the bedclothes with him.’4

In the same vein, Stanley writes to Henry Lamb: ‘When you see how Gil’s painting is getting on, you will say to yourself “Oh! He must not go to the war!”’5 Gilbert’s painting was The Crucifixion. In stark, angular composition it shows the Cross in process of being raised from the horizontal to the vertical. But the figure outstretched on it is Pa, and those hauling him up are five round-faced, dark-haired young men uncannily like the Spencer boys; from which we may suspect that Gilbert is telling of his sympathy for the old man, whose headstrong sons, so anxious to go to war, are emotionally crucifying him. Is then Stanley’s The Centurion’s Servant a comparable allegory, the visual equivalent of a personal nightmare or sleepwalk? Arguably so. Not only is this the first occasion on which Stanley places himself recognizably as the subject of a visionary painting, but even more decisively he stands back to watch himself in his experience by placing himself as the centre onlooker of the kneeling figures, the one who seems to show no emotion but curiosity or contemplation.

Stanley had begun to think about the biblical story (Luke 7, Matthew 8) in 1913, conceiving it as a double picture, one section showing the messenger running to Christ, the other Christ’s miracle in healing from a distance the centurion’s servant or batman. As with all his paintings to date, he envisaged exterior settings. But ‘this seemed beyond me, although in trying to imagine what the scene would be like, I began to find my mind in very outdoor places. I vaguely remember willows and sunlight in certain parts of Cookham.’6 The imagery, however, would not materialize and ‘in that baffled state my mind wandered into some shade, and in doing so I wondered what the scene would be at the house where the servant actually lay, seven miles away. Here I seemed to find better foothold.’ The imagery began to take shape. It would be Stanley’s first use of an interior, a considerable step in that paced progression which characterized his development. The interior would be a sickroom, a bedroom. So somewhere in his experience he had to cast around for a bedroom which by its association of feeling would recreate for him the sense of the miraculous to which the painting was dedicated.