Here's a short review I wrote for the local rag about the above lecture at Bristol University.
Swan Upping at Cookham : Stanley Spencer 1915 - 1919
The first time 17 year old Stanley Spencer made what would become a daily commute between his home in Cookham and the Slade School of Fine Art, his father, William, accompanied him to see him safely across Euston Road.
Within a few years, Spencer turned his half-finished painting, Swan Upping at Cookham, to the wall and enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving first as an orderly in Beaufort Hospital, Stapleton (‘that vile place’) and later with the 68th Field Ambulance Unit on the front line in Macedonia.
Under the Hill : Paul Nash, 1912
In the latest lecture in the series entitled The Artist at War, put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Paul Gough sought to explore the visual language of conflict by contrasting Spencer’s work with that of his friend and peer, the landscape artist Paul Nash, who enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and served on the Western Front before becoming an official war artist in November 1917.
Both artists were profoundly affected by their experience of battle. ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious,’ wrote Nash to his wife, ‘I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’
We Are Making A New World : Paul Nash, 1918
Nash went on to produce some of the most iconic and searing images of the battlefields of Belgium and France and, in Gough’s words, ‘introduced a new language of devastation to the genre of landscape.’
Having returned to Cookham at the end of 1918, Spencer managed to finish Swan Upping but struggled to assimilate his recent past into his work, often stating ‘It is not proper or sensible to expect to paint after such experience.’ It was only when he received the commission from his patrons, the Behrens, for a memorial chapel at Burghlere to Mary Behren’s brother, Lieutenant Henry William Sandham, that he had the opportunity to undertake his astonishing and moving ‘re-membering’ of war, based on his time in Bristol and Macedonia.
And so to London to see Leonard Cohen at the O2, but first a stop en route to see Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire - a return trip for me, having paid homage there a few Octobers ago, but a first visit for my companion.
Sandham is a 1920s Grade 1-listed chapel built as a memorial to Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who died in 1919 from malaria contracted during the Macedonian campaign of the First World War. It houses a
series of paintings by Stanley Spencer, inspired by his own war experiences as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, in Beaufort Hospital in Bristol and in Macedonia. It's forbidden to photograph the paintings because the low light levels in the Chapel would require flash photography, but no matter, I've pinched a few of the National Trust's photos off t'internet.
This is a view of The Resurrection of the Soldiers behind the altar, in which dozens of soldiers bring their white wooden crosses to a Christ in white sat in the middle distance of the picture. I especially like this scene because as well as men, it shows animals as part of the resurrection - specifically, mules - quite a controversial viewpoint at the time of its painting.
I also love the altar cloth which is woven with the words 'I am the Resurrection and the Life' horizontally and 'We are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On' vertically.
There are quite a few heart motifs in the paintings and my favourite is in the picture Tea in the Hospital Ward (look at the plate in the foreground). Spencer's favourite food was bread and jam.
Another favourite thing of Spencer's at Beaufort Hospital was to hide between the huge baths 'to escape tiresome duties or simply to work alone and undisturbed'.
The paintings are full of allusions - orderlies who resemble angels, one with buckets for wings, patients in Christ-like poses, mosquito nets like chrysalises.
I feel a bit of a connection with Sandham, in part because my grandmother, Hilda Hill, worked as a volunteer in a war hospital during WWI. Like Spencer hiding between the baths, Hilda was a free spirit - for instance, she once smuggled apples in her apron for the wounded soldiers and had to hide behind a curtain when the sister came into the ward, only to drop the apples and send them rolling over the floor.
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