Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham in 1891. He went to the Slade School of Fine Art in 1908 under the inspirational Professor Henry Tonks. In 1912 he returned to Cookham which he saw as 'a kind of earthly paradise' and began work on the many paintings deeply rooted in his unique spiritual vision which featured the local countryside, houses and gardens in the village and local residents, friends and family.
At the onset of the First World War he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and in 1916 was posted to Macedonia. He was never an official war artist but the most powerful record of his wartime experiences is the series of 19 paintings in the purpose-built Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire, on which he worked almost continuously between 1926 and 1932.
In 1925 he married the artist Hilda Carline and they had two daughters: Shirin and Unity. Already recognised as a major talent for his work at the Sandham Chapel, his great painting The Resurrection, Cookham (set in Cookham churchyard and painted between 1924 and 1926) established his reputation. He began planning his Church House project on the lines of the Sandham Chapel but expressing his preoccupation with the sacredness of erotic love, an obsession which was to dominate not only his paintings but his life. He became infatuated with another Slade-trained artist living in Cookham, Patricia Preece, whom he married in 1937 immediately after his divorce. The relationship was a disaster from the first but resulted in the series of uncompromising nude portraits of which the most famous is Double Nude Portrait: the Artist and his Second Wife. Although the Church House was never built, he continued to work on paintings for the cycle almost until the end of his life.
Between 1940 and 1946 Spencer worked on the eight completed epic depictions of merchant ship-building on the Clyde commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee. After the war he returned to Cookham, embarking on the huge Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta which remained unfinished at his death. He was knighted in July 1959, and died only five months later on 14 December 1959. The Royal Academy put on a major retrospective in 1980 and by 2000 Spencer was generally regarded as the most important British painter in the first half of the 20th century.
Spencer's connection with the borough
Stanley Spencer was born on 30 June 1891 at Fernlea, High Street, Cookham, a semi-detached villa built by his grandfather. He lived in Cookham for most of his life buying Lindworth, a fairly substantial semi-detached house in the centre of the village, in 1932 and after the war moving into Cliveden View, a small house in Cookham Rise. He moved back to Fernlea (now Fernley) for the last year of his life. His father William was a music teacher and organist at Hedsor church described as 'a patriarchal figure who cycled around Cookham reciting Ruskin aloud'. Music was a dominant influence in the lives of the nine surviving Spencer children. Stanley's elder brother, also William, was a child prodigy pianist who went on to become professor at the Bern Music Institute.
The other dominant influence was religion: William senior's affiliation to the formal Church of England, balanced by the less straitlaced Methodism of his wife, Mary, who took Stanley to the Wesleyan Chapel in Cookham (now the Stanley Spencer Gallery opened in 1962 by the Friends of Stanley Spencer Trust). 'Pa', bearded and frock-coated, is recognisable in many of Spencer's later paintings. Both Stanley and his brother Gilbert showed early artistic promise and they were initially taught by Dorothy Bailey, daughter of the local artist William Bailey. After a year as a full-time art student at the technical school in Maidenhead, Stanley went on to the leading art school of the day in London, the Slade School of Fine Art..
Always an oddity - only 5' 2" in height, already sporting his characteristic pudding-basin haircut and fringe at the Slade - by the 1950s Stanley, 'biblically inspired and at times unstoppably loquacious', had become a highly visible and eccentric presence in Cookham, trundling his painting equipment around in a dilapidated ancient black pram, 'his pyjama trousers peeping out underneath his trousers, his Woolworth's glasses tipping off his nose'.
Knighted in July 1959 he died only five months later on 14 December, of cancer, in the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital at Taplow. His ashes are buried in Cookham churchyard.