Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

Why, one might ask, did Stanley not select any bedroom, or indeed invent one? Not merely in Stanley’s failure to do so but in his actual inability to do so, we glimpse one essence of his genius. Truth demanded not just a bedroom but the only bedroom possible for the revelation: ‘I don’t think it struck me then as it does now that the room I selected as being the bedroom in which the servant was to suddenly revive was our own servant’s bedroom. I mean [that it was purely coincidence] that they were both servants and both in bedrooms.’ Stanley’s memory had settled on the servant’s attic bedroom at Fernlea not because it classified itself as the bedroom of a servant; still less because the servant was a female. He is more than anxious to disabuse the reader of any connection between the mystery of the event and the possibility that the servants were mysterious to him as female, or that the room was mysterious to him, as some rooms were later to become to him, because he was not allowed to enter them. On the contrary, ‘there was never any ban on one going into the attic and I remember that up until shortly after I began to go to the Slade I usually used to sit by the gable window and talk to the servant dressing, and quite innocent [even at] about 19 or 20 years of age’ – ‘quite innocent’ because the maids were usually local girls taking an occupation before hopefully getting married. The reason why Stanley picked the servant’s attic bedroom was because:

The attic had a dark recess in which was the big bed, and the china knobs could be seen now and then when the door was open, and when [one day] I passed the door I was impressed to hear her talking to some invisible person, [whom I imagined to be] a sort of angel. This [in fact] was the servant next door. She was talking through the wall, as our own attic and the one next door had only a wall between them. This I did not know till later. When she came down in her afternoon frock from this room I almost expected her face to shine as Moses’ did when he came down from the mountains.

Stanley is transferring to the painting that sense of awe he felt on the day he heard the servant talking to her angel, to recreate the holy sense of awe which must have overcome the centurion and his servant on that day two thousand years ago when they knew the joy of salvation from death. He transfers the manner of its arriving to recreate through the medium of art his own joy at finding himself the recipient of a miracle too. He is himself the subject of the painting, as he describes:

The running attitude of the figure on the bed was arrived at through a consideration which did not materialize. I had originally thought of depicting the meeting of Christ and the centurion [as an exterior]. Then, when I was feeling there was too much out-of-doors element in the idea, I considered also including the scene in the servant’s bedroom showing his miraculous recovery. I thought I would like to have two pictures in one frame, with a frame between them as division. In the meeting picture, the centurion was to repeat something of the position of the servant lying on the bed which can, I think, be seen to be similar in position to a person walking, only it is lying down. As I lay on my bed one evening in our front bedroom, I realized that I was in such a comfortable position that I would love to take that ‘just-me-happy-on-the-front-room-bed’ and plant it, with all its fact elements retained, into the other picture. I tried this many times, but it did not come as I wanted and finally I painted the bedroom idea alone. I at this time liked to gaze round the Church when praying and feel the atmosphere I was praying in. In the picture I have remembered my own praying positions in the people praying round the bed, because I knew the state of mind I wanted in the picture was to be peaceful, as mine was in Church, even though the miracle had occurred.

How compressed are Stanley’s descriptions of his great paintings! The figure on the bed is ‘a person walking only it is lying down’. Visually it is the messenger running to meet Christ of the aborted exterior panel; but spiritually it is the distress of Stanley’s dilemma transferred en bloc into the bedroom scene. Yet, conversely, the ‘state of mind’ he wanted to express in the painting was to be ‘peaceful’, so that ‘the miracle had occurred’; so ‘peace’ is invoked from the terror through his recollected feelings of lying comfortably in bed ‘in our front bedroom’, but even more from the sensations which overcame him when he gazed around during prayer in Cookham church to catch the ‘atmosphere’.

Later he adds: ‘The people praying round the bed may have something to do with the fact that in our village, if anyone was very ill, the custom was to pray round the bed, and I thought of all the moments of peace when at such moments the scene might occur …’ – 7 and there was in Spencer-family recollection an episode in which one of the older boys developed pneumonia. Watched over anxiously by the womenfolk, the stage in the illness was at last reached when young Sydney was sent to run to Pa at Hedsor to tell him that ‘the crisis has come’; a message which reached Pa’s ears as ‘Christ has come.’

The Centurion’s Servant, like The Betrayal, marks a crisis of its own in Stanley’s development. Before it, all his painting had been done in the unfettered joy of creative metaphysical-spiritual discovery. Then, suddenly, the impending war introduced a brutality in existence until then unsuspected. Its darkness broke his arcadia, left him in shock. He had to find a way back to comfort and assurance, and in this endeavour he recognized The Centurion’s Servant as a watershed in his art. Never again would he be able to recreate exactly the feelings of ‘innocence’ which pervaded his earlier paintings, a loss he would ever lament. But in the destruction of that innocence the marvel to him was that he was given the means to find reconciliation. We may venture what they were.

In all his visionary pictures, no matter what the titled subject, Stanley is ultimately depicting a cluster of associated experiences, or ‘memory-feelings’ as he called them. They are chosen so that the feeling he draws from them matches the current feeling he is trying to express in his painting. This happened for him joyously in his earlier paintings when metaphysical revelation could be visualized from his happy feelings about moments and places in Fernlea and Cookham. But now that he is in shock the match cannot be made directly, for he has no store of shocked memory-feelings. Should he paint reflexively and let his anger show? Such was the response of many painters, especially of the artists of the coming war.

But Stanley’s genius is such that he has an added layer to his personality which lifts him above the merely reflexive. Since his distress is greater than can be shown in even the most hurtful experience he can recall, he relates their feeling to a more powerful source, one which will convey the intensity of the required terror: in this present painting, the Bible and one of its happenings. The story he selects describes terror. But its significance is such that in doing so it is able to reveal the possibility of release from terror. The centurion is terrified; Christ in healing his servant releases him from his terror. For the centurion a redemption has occurred. If Stanley is to find a corresponding release from present terror he too must go back in memory-feelings to a remembered redemption of his own and link its feeling to the power of the biblical event. In composing his picture he will show a moment of personal terror in one part, and then reveal its redemption in another. In this respect an event which happened powerfully in the Bible has already happened for him, even if less emphatically, in Cookham. ‘If I had not had that subject, I could not have drawn any of that picture,’ he was to say of one religious painting.8

What he is doing in The Centurion’s Servant is that which he will struggle to do for the rest of his life when baffled by the painful. As he grows older he will accumulate memory-feelings sufficiently vivid to match and redeem some bewilderments. But there will also be occasions when his distress will be so agonized that only a return to biblical example will suffice to indicate its intensity. There will even be instances when he is unable to find any forceful match at all between his feelings and the redemption of memory. Then he will be left frustrated, unable to compose his picture, or else forced to use memory-feelings which are ‘incompetent’ and which in his opinion dilute his intention. But when he can find a match, as in this instance, the ways he finds for expressing it will be a continual surprise and wonder.

The process by which Stanley arrives at his notions is subtle, perhaps subconscious, perhaps instinctive, but invariably logical in metaphysical terms, and always precise. To convey it, he first states the fact of what is taking place. This he depicts so transparently – and in later work with such honest directness – that we should not be tempted into thinking that he intends self-revelation from a desire for self-indulgence. The emotion inherent in the content, even when related to the event he so strikingly depicts, is not used as direct imagery; such use would be sentimentality. Although the imagery of the picture is personal, it is there to transcend the personal. It may be of interest and indeed of help to know that clues to the imagery can lie somewhere in his writings. But detection does not necessarily establish the true notion of the painting; the clues are merely signposts. Once Stanley has found his imagery in the personal, then the associative emotion determines the visual pattern or arrangement in the depiction; the composition. In redemptive work, provided that the imagery to hand was what Stanley called ‘man enough to do the job’ – there could be no compromise with the ‘Holy Ghost’ – there will be great, even vital, significance in the painting: a redemption, an emotional movement from one state of awareness to a higher. It is this triumphant discovery which The Centurion’s Servant records.

In this sense it seems cogent to argue that there was in Stanley’s make-up a quality which makes him a dramatic painter. His visionary paintings capture an instant of tension between a before situation and an after situation, like a strip of movie film stopped in the projector. Each painting is that crucial freeze-frame which exactly pinpoints the moment when we become aware that a change is about to happen – The Nativity – or is happening – Apple Gatherers – or has happened – The Centurion’s Servant. The freeze-frame is not a random moment. It is the consequence of decision, more particularly of commitment. Its effect is a catharsis, a purging, the moment in drama when the confusion of reality is suddenly dissolved into spiritual comprehension. At that moment, the preceding is clarified and linked to the now inevitable. The past cannot be undone, but it can be apprehended in some awesome synthesis of meaning. A god has come.

Redemption to Stanley was the miraculous means by which he got himself, through his pictures, to where all was ‘holy, personal and at peace’; in other words, to his feelings for ‘home’. His pictures are not illustrations of redemptions. They are in themselves a reaching to redemption. It is irrelevant that the past in The Centurion’s Servant may be a recollection of some serious Spencer family illness or that Stanley has portrayed the future as an expression of ‘cosiness’ in bed, its valance echoing those of Edwardian prams. Neither the title, nor its allusions, nor its associations are to be taken at face value, and to do so is to limit, even destroy, their meaning. Particularly with this picture Stanley felt that critics might decide its presentation derived from an unpatriotic reluctance to go to the war. The thought of such possibility could never be allowed to interfere with the form of the work. If the content came to him vividly, then it must be valid, demanding expression without dissemblance. Only so could a path be cleared through confusion to meaning. The best precaution he could presently take against misinterpretation was to conceal the painting, even though the clarity he found in its execution convinced him of the truth of his feelings:

My bed picture is an example of how a picture ought to be painted. Everything in that picture, colour particularly, was perfectly clear, and the way to get the colour decided in my mind before I put brush to canvas. The result was that it was done in no time, it was done like clockwork. … What pleases me is that I have learned the reason why the picture should be done so as to let me see the idea without having to plough through incompetent [irrelevant] detail that has no fundamental bearing on the idea.9*

Stanley’s excitement at his achievement is obvious. Some outside force is acting on him, easing his mental suffering into that state of peace through which he can joyfully offer tribute. His picture ‘lets him see’ his idea in uncluttered clarity. The joy it gave him sprang not from the fact that the picture indicated a solution to the perplexity from which it originated; the imperative of physical reality continued to assail. Rather his joy sprang from a discovery that the making of the picture discharged his emotional distress. It was a redemption. In it, reason became the servant of imagination, imagination of feeling, feeling of revelation, revelation of comprehension, and comprehension the miraculous gift from some exterior power. The process was religious. When in later years an art critic interpreted it as the reaction of children caught in an air-raid, Stanley’s contempt was vitriolic*

For the time being, however, nothing was done with the painting. Stanley stored it in his room at Fernlea while he settled to other work. One such was among the first of what must be called his ‘landscapes’: the painting of Cookham, 1914.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cookham, 1914

Excuse my muddle-headedness and slowness, when I see anything I see everything, and when I can’t see one thing I see absolutely nothing.

Stanley Spencer1

SUPERFICIALLY The Nativity and even John Donne Arriving in Heaven can be classified as landscapes. But Stanley would not have regarded them so. For him landscapes, like still-lifes and portraits, captured tangible objects in real time. They can be called his observed paintings. Unlike his visionary or compositional work, observed paintings were invariably painted or sketched in situ, where possible in contiguous sessions. In them detail is precise and often continued full into the foreground, a technique which gives such paintings wide-angle clarity of definition and the strong visual impact resulting from great depth of field.* An ancillary of the method, the use of a high-angle viewpoint, occurs in his first major landscape, Cookham, 1914, and has been proposed as imaginary,3 because Stanley often used such viewpoints in subsequent visionary work. But he never did so, we can be sure, in observed paintings. There will exist an exact spot near Cookham which shows the scene precisely as Stanley saw it. It has been identified as near Terry’s Lane in Cookham leading up to Winter Hill, a little beyond Rowborough House.4

In the most compelling of Stanley’s landscapes, we glimpse the power that place had for him: ‘My landscape painting has enabled me to keep my bearings. It has been my contact with the world, my soundings taken, my plumb-line dropped.’5 Meticulousness of detail was not an arbitrarily adopted style. He could paint in no other way, for the precision in his personality was the physical manifestation of his inner search for veracity. Cookham, 1914 was the forerunner of a magnificent procession of observed paintings, hundreds in all, so decorative and so sought-after that he found himself frequently leaning on them for income. At times he complained of having to churn them out. Sometimes his complaint was justified because he was too rushed and the result mechanical. But in less hurried times he could enjoy the contemplative opportunities they afforded. We should not be deceived by his wail; it reflects only annoyance that he had to give them precedence at periods when he wanted to concentrate on visionary work.

Place, for Stanley, meant objects observed in relation to one another. In a newly observed scene neither the objects nor their relationship would have an immediate impact. Only when he drew some associative inference would the place take meaning. The process needed time. Given time, the place would assume for him an identity from his perception of its components. Change one, and for him the entire identity of the place changed. Thus his more powerful landscapes became connections between himself and the spirit of the landscape which had imposed its identity on him. At the moment of imposition, of connection, the place became an entity, a stasis.

Thus his landscapes in general lack figures. An animate figure, however discreet, would be an intrusion in the stasis of the scene. But stasis does not imply passivity. Each landscape in which place sang for Stanley revealed to him a necessary natural creation which would persist whether or not man interferes. He told Edward Marsh, who bought Cookham, 1914,6 ‘I think the true landscape you have of mine has a feeling of leading to something I want in it, I know I was reading English Ballads at the time and feeling a new and personal value of the Englishness of England.’7 It is in the brooding calm of their existence that the power for Stanley of such landscapes rests. They are simply being.

When then is the distinction between such paintings and his visionary work? Why were the latter more significant for him? Essentially it was a question of how fully he could join himself to whatever he was painting. In observed painting, even the most sympathetic, he was not able wholly to amalgamate himself with his subject: ‘It is strange that I feel so “lonely” when I draw from nature, but it is because no sort of spiritual activity comes into the business at all – it’s this identity business,’ he was later to write.8 Place became ecstatic for him when it became wholly subjective: ‘It must be remembered that whatsoever I talk about is the whole thing, by which I mean that if I refer to a place, I am talking of a place plus myself plus all associating matters of personal characteristics respecting myself.’9 He saw it through a filter of personal associations which transfigured it into metaphysical meaning.

But when it came to the visionary paintings this raised a pictorial problem: ‘I need people in my pictures as I need them in my life. A place is incomplete without a person. A person is a place’s fulfilment as a place is a person’s.’10 But figures depicted in the same way as he portrayed the detail of merely observed places or objects would destroy the stasis, even when his feelings about the figures made them its fulfilment. They could not be shown in that way, even when they were derived from people he knew and were associated with the place.

Stanley’s solution was not to paint the detail in such pictures as it could be observed. The places would be real, but not painted objectively. Nor would figures: they could be real persons but would emerge from his composition in a transfigured form. Both place and people would be reconstructed visually out of his metaphysical relationship with them, after contemplation and invariably in the quiet of a studio. Thus when Stanley paints visionary effusions he is not painting a real place, even though he makes use of one; he is not painting real people, even though he is using them; he is not even painting his feelings about both, though he is making use of them. He is painting a transfiguration of experience. *

This did not mean that he painted such pictures with less meticulousness than he painted his observed scenes. On the contrary, the transfiguration involved him in the most exact choices, for it demanded forms of expression which to the untutored eye can appear to be distorted. If he had to use such distortion of detail, then it had to be in tune with the emotional content of the whole. The balancing act in this process made composition frequently an agony, especially in his novitiate years:

I have [only] as yet been able to see something I want to write or paint in a disarranged state. It is as if I had seen a box of chessmen and had no idea of how or in what order they were to be placed. But I would know if a domino or some draughts got into the box that they had nothing to do with the chess pieces. I know to the last detail what does belong to the game. I only don’t know yet the order. It is a big ‘only’. I have noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design.13

His own expressed distinction between his observed and visionary paintings was that the observed paintings ‘had no memory-feeling’. Memory-feeling was the mainspring of transfiguration. Only when memory-feelings crystallized as moments of metaphysical illumination would people and places merge for Stanley. Then the figures would become personifications, incarnations, of experience through which Stanley strove to approach the meaning by restoring the experience. But the miracle to Stanley was that the attempt to capture the illumination, to approach the meaning, enabled him to compose a work of art based on the sensation of the originating experience but in an imagery which transfigured it and gave him a joy and happiness he could find in no other way. It is a true source of art: certainly of Stanley’s art.

CHAPTER NINE

Swan Upping

‘What do they mean by religious art? It is an absurdity. How can you make religious art one day and another kind the next?’

Picasso1

MYSTICISM? EXORCISM? ESCAPISM? SUBLIMATION? Stanley’s astonishing access to the disjointed memory-feelings of his subconscious, and his creative ability to associate them, in whatever random or involuntary way they might have come to him, into patterns of meaning – paintings – which constructed for him a metaphysical world alternative to the physical world, all these could fascinate a psychologist: as in fact they were to do in later life. Through his midwifery of the metaphysical from the physical, his redemption, Stanley was evolving a unique form of expression, a language.

Modernism was arriving, its battle-cry ‘directness is all’. Directness was to be achieved by dismembering an object, event or sensation into its apprehended constituents and then clinically and unsentimentally reassembling them into a taut form which, however surprising it might at first appear, was to the artist more truthful in re-fashioning the essence of the original than contemporary representational art could offer.

It may seem a far cry to a puzzled young painter cloistered in an English village. But the link existed. Picasso’s exploration of cubism remained as solidly based on real objects as Stanley’s compositions did on places. Proust’s happiness in his cobbles2 was echoed in that of Gwen in hers, his mysterious feelings about his hawthorn blossom by Stanley’s for his Cookham wildflowers.* James Joyce exactly recalling sensation, even of the cloacal, parallels Stanley sitting seemingly for hours on the outside loo at Fernlea with a worm or newt on his bare thigh to relish its movement against his skin; a habit his family, awaiting their turn, found infuriating. D. H. Lawrence, celebrating sexuality, presages Stanley having an ‘interesting discussion’ with young Peggy Hatch ‘on the relative sizes of our legs just above the knee, but only just above’,4 or tentatively feeling the penis of a boyhood companion and wondering at its softness,* or in the quiet of Wistaria Cottage imagining a girl ‘squatting’ before him, then feeling a ‘warm glow’ at the spectacle of the uncovered legs of girls as they played in the straw, or momentarily breathless at the sight of a girl bending to retrieve a ball through railings.6 For each artist, the minutiae of physical sensation demanded a place in the totality of experience, even if for Stanley their expression in pencil or paint was still hesitantly circumscribed.