Stanley
Spencer, the son of William Spencer, a teacher of music, was born
in Cookham, Berkshire, in 1891. When Spencer was seventeen he entered
the Slade School of Fine
Art at University College, London.
Other students at the Slade at that time included C.
R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler.
At the Slade he won the Composition Prize with his painting The
Nativity (1912).
On the outbreak of the First World War, Spencer
joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC).
For a while he worked at Beaufort Hospital in Bristol
but in August 1916 he was sent as part of the 68th Field Ambulance
unit to Salonika, a port being defended
by General Maurice Sarrail and 150,000,
British and French soldiers.
In
May, 1918, Stanley Spencer was asked to contribute to the government's
planned Hall of Remembrance.
The letter asked him to to
paint a picture about his experiences in Salonika.
However, it was not until after the Armistice
that Spencer painted Travoys
Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September
1916.
After the war Stanley
Spencer was commissioned to paint a decorative mural of army life
for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in
Burghclere, Hampshire (1926-32). The mural was painted as a modern
parallel to Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua. The cycle of scenes from
everyday military life culminates in the altarpiece,
Resurrection
of the Soldiers.
Spencer was also a War Artist in the Second World
War. His best known work during this period was a series of panels
depicting Shipbuilding
on the Clyde.
After 1945 he returned to the resurrection theme in a series of large-scale
religious works. Stanley
Spencer
died in 1959.
(1)
Stanley Spencer, letter to his friend Henry
Lamb, who had recently decided to join the Royal Army Medical
Corps (RAMC).
Do
you know any decent regiment that would have me or Gil (his brother
Gilbert Spencer)? We both feel it impossible to settle down, because
to work at our job one has to enjoy things and I find it impossible.
I think it is necessary for people like me to join. I am quite sure
I am as strong as thousands who are fighting, and the beastly the
stories become, the more I feel I ought to go to do something.
(2) In 1914 Stanley
Spencer joined the RAMC and was sent to Beaufort Hospital in Bristol
where he looked after injured soldiers from the Western
Front. He wrote a letter to Henry Lamb,
about his experiences on 7th December, 1915.
Two hundred patients or more would arrive in the middle of the night
- this was disquieting and disturbing. One had just got used to the
patients one had; had mentally and imaginatively visualized them.
I have to move patients with their beds from one ward to another or
perhaps to the theatre.
(3) Stanley Spencer,
letter to Desmond Chute (January, 1917)
I do anything for these men. I cannot refuse them anything, and they
love me to make drawings of photos of their wives and children or
a brother who had been killed.
(4)
Stanley Spencer wrote about his war experiences in a letter to Richard
Carline in 1929.
My feelings about the Bulgars were acted upon in a very remarkable
way, owing to the simple fact that I never saw them, and yet they
were only a few yards away. They were the enemy - this gave me this
feeling of remoteness from them - a feeling that they belonged to
another planet. Some nights it was extraordinary to me to hear the
ground crunching under the wheels of some cart when I was told it
was the Bulgars' ration carts coming up, just as ours brought ours
up.
Our activities consisted of outpost duty and patrolling the wire at
night and during the daytime doing odd fatigues, just outside our
dugouts. In the evening just before sunset, the Bulgars started a
barrage. The shells dropped uncomfortably near and I was glad when
getting into the outposts, we were able to take cover in a communication
trench.
I went out with a captain and he was hit and sank to the ground. His
hand went up to his neck and I saw a gaping bullet wound in it. I
bandaged the wound the best I could and called for stretcher-bearers.
I helped to support the captain, who was paralyzed and heard him whisper
to another officer: "Understand, Spencer is not a fool; he is
a damned good man." "What's all this? Who has been saying
otherwise?"
(5)
Letter from the Ministry of Information to Stanley Spencer (May, 1918)
Mr. Muirhead Bone, who takes a great interest in your work, has suggested
that you should paint a picture under such title as A Religious
Service at the Front, or any subjects in or about Salonika, which
could be painted by you before you return home.
(6)
In a letter to Hilda Carline in the summer of 1923, Stanley Spencer
recalled how it got the idea for Travoys
Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September
1916
I was standing a little way from an old Greek Church, which was used
as a dressing station, and coming there were these rows of travoys
with wounded and limbers crammed full of wounded men. One would have
thought that the scene was a sordid one, a terrible scene, but I felt
there was a grandeur about it. All these wounded men were calm and
at peace with everything, so the pain seemed a small thing with them.
I felt there was a spiritual ascendancy over everything.
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