David Boyd Haycock - A Crisis of Brilliance
© Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead
Sir Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959): Born into a large middle-class
family in Cookham, Berkshire, Spencer was one of the finest talents ever to
attend the Slade School of Art. Passionately devoted to his hometown, which
was the subject or scene of most of his paintings, at the Slade he was known
simply as ‘Cookham’.
Some of his greatest works were painted whilst he was still a very young man,
either just before or just after the start of the Great War. He would spend the
rest of his life trying to recapture this blissful period.
Volunteering with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he served in Macedonia, where
he transferred to the infantry. Late in the War he was commissioned into the
Official War Artist scheme. His extraordinary murals at the Sandham Memorial
Chapel at Burghclere record many of his wartime experiences. A critic who saw
it shortly after completion wrote of his sense ‘that every one of the thousand
memories recorded had been driven into the artist’s consciousness like
a sharp-pointed nail’. It has been described by Jon Snow as ‘Britain’s
Sistine Chapel’.