Stanley Spencer (Text Only)

CHAPTER TWO

The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf

All my drawings are self-portraits, and no amount of ‘abstract’ or what-not will conceal from that.

Stanley Spencer1

AT THE SLADE, which Stanley attended from 1908 to 1912, his talents were quickly recognized. In 1909 he was awarded an endowed scholarship and became financially, if modestly, independent. ‘Our genius’ became the epithet half enviously, half affectionately given to the young Stanley by his fellow-students. It did not prevent some of them from ragging or playing practical jokes on him, which he tolerated good-humouredly, except when directed at his art and its integrity. His dedicated nature had little patience with the public-school-type humour prevalent among some of the well-heeled young bloods there. Goaded on one occasion beyond endurance, he silenced one tormentor by pouring white paint over his new suit.*

It was the custom for the students, girls included, to be known only by their surnames. Stanley became not Spencer, but ‘Cookham’. Among the star students of his years – Allinson, Gertler, Nevinson, Currie, Brett, Raverat, Japp, Carrington, Wadsworth, Roberts, Bömberg and Rosenberg – was Gwen Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and reared in the academic atmosphere of Cambridge. Six years older than Stanley in age but perhaps a lifetime older in practical experience, Gwen took the young genius under her wing. He needed sympathetic guidance, a spiritual handholder.

The Slade students then were in the forefront of the Edwardian counterblast to Victorian materialism and sentimentality. It was an exciting age in which to be young. In contact at the Slade with lively young minds inevitably fascinated by the new modernism, Stanley encountered moments when his cautious and deliberate absorption of experience was misunderstood. His celebrated reply when asked at the Slade what he thought of Picasso – that he, Stanley, had ‘not got beyond Piero della Francesca’ – was considered supercilious. But Stanley did not mean to be patronizing. His mind was an instrument which sought connection, and the operation required time. Although he understood the aims of modernism and indeed shared its essential techniques, the fragmentation of its venturing repelled his instinct for totality. Starting from Pa’s advocacy of Ruskin and Tonks’ enthusiasm for early Renaissance painting, Stanley found in medieval art a serenity which matched his aspirations. Artists then, he argued, were integrated members of a stable culture. They were workmen – stone carvers in the Gothic north, mosaicists and fresco painters in the classical south – whose everyday talents were devoted to the beautifying of the churches, chapels, abbeys and great cathedrals which across Western Europe dedicated political power and economic wealth to the glory of the God who had accomplished them. Ruskin, in his opulent prose, set one such painter in his time:

Giotto, like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling decorator of walls, at so much a day, having at Florence a bottega or workshop for the production of small tempera pictures. There were no such things as ‘studios’ in those days. An artist’s ‘studies’ were over by the time he was eighteen; after that he was a lavatore, a ‘labourer’, a man who knew the business and produced certain works of known value for a known price, being troubled with no philosophical abstractions, shutting himself in no wise for the reception of inspiration; receiving indeed a good many as a matter of course, just as he received the sunbeams that came in at his window, the light which he worked by; – in either case without mouthing about it, or merely concerning himself as to the nature of it.

How exactly the sentiments matched Stanley’s! First written in the 1850s, they were published in reprint by George Allen in 1900 as Giotto and his Works at Padua. Gwen lent Stanley a copy. The glory of the subject was to remain evergreen throughout his life. The apprentice Stanley had no problem with his sunbeams; what he needed was the technique to manifest them. Although Stanley absorbed the excitements of the times, he rebuffed attempts at the Slade to recruit him to partisanship. The function of the place was simply to teach him to draw.

Academically, the Slade emphasized precision in line, a feature which reflected the forceful personality of Tonks. A surgeon by profession, he had long been fascinated by art and was delighted to be enticed into teaching by his friend Ernest Brown, the Slade Professor. A tingling of apprehension would herald his visits to the students working in the lofty hall of the men’s Life Class. The college organized a sketch club which held periodic competitions on set subjects, usually biblical. The entries, submitted anonymously, were judged by Tonks, and the prizes were welcome, especially to the poorer scholarship students. Unfortunately Stanley seldom won,* not because his draughtsmanship was inferior but because his compositions were judged not to illustrate the set theme effectively. Herein lies the first indication of a misunderstanding of the intention of Stanley’s art which was to dog him all his life, and which indeed persists in some respects to this day.

Most of Stanley’s early drawings – he had not yet seriously ventured into painting – are entries for these competitions. However, The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf was drawn at the request of a Miss White of Bourne End to illustrate a fairy story she had written.4 She must have been surprised at the result. Stanley’s fairy is no elfin figure, but a substantial young lady impossibly posed on two waterlily leaves which in real life would instantly have sunk under her weight. But of course this is not real life, so Stanley portrays the prince who woos her as a Renaissance figure. He was copied from one of Stanley’s Slade life-class studies of a male model there called Edmunds.

The fairy too was drawn from life. Her name was Dorothy Wooster (Worster). She and her sister Emily were cousins and had been school pupils with Stanley and Gilbert. But the significant fact about Dorothy was that Stanley was boyishly attracted to her, as was Gilbert to Emily, despite their father, the local butcher, being parentally suspicious of the young Spencers’ interest in his daughters.

Stanley’s patron had evidently asked for a drawing showing the love of a prince for a fairy. His method of imagining it was to assemble from his own experience images with which he could reproduce the emotion of that theme. The prince was in love with his fairy; he, Stanley, was in love with Dot. So he simply draws her in the situation, buoyant and beautiful because she is loved. The fact that she would sink like a stone was irrelevant: to Stanley the reality of the imagery is subservient to its emotion. However, Stanley admits that the fairy would be small, so he diminishes her by extending the wheat-stalks on the left. There would be water, so what better location than one eventful in his boyhood memory, a little sandy beach by the bank of the Thames where, Florence tells us, all the Spencer children loved to play when young. Simple, one might say, almost ‘primitive’.

But there is in the drawing a curious detail. In the top left, three flowers or marsh plants are reflected as though on the surface of a pond. In many future paintings we shall find similar detail inserted apparently randomly. Yet its presence can change the entire emphasis of the work. In this case, it suggests that Stanley has turned the smooth surface of the pond from the horizontal to the vertical, so that it becomes a reflecting plate-glass window. The world beyond it is enchanted, its apprehension as intangible as the world Stanley entered when he heard fine music played; the flower reflections have taken the form of musical crochets. The fairy is an emanation from that world, but when the magic ends must return to it. The prince, being of the ‘real’ world, cannot enter that land. Stanley ruefully confesses in his letters that he never had great success with the village girls – ‘buds’ to him – and his anticipation at walking and talking with them was invariably disappointed when they failed to match his soaring expectations. Still, he was asked for a drawing of love, and so his love for Dot, which is the love of the prince for the fairy, which is the theme of love in the drawing, becomes a transcendence of the physical into that magic state Stanley cannot yet attain but which he knows to be the spiritual, ‘heaven’.

The authoress rejected the drawing. Its heavy, earthy presentation failed to meet the ethereal romanticism she evidently expected. She must have been as puzzled and offended by it as Stanley was puzzled and disappointed at its rejection. The two minds simply did not meet. In July 1919 he gave it as a wedding present to Ruth Lowy, whose family lived near Cookham. She and Stanley often travelled together on the train to London and the Slade, and she had bought some of his early work. Neither Ruth nor her husband, Victor Gollancz, could understand why Stanley had selected it as a gift. They asked him what it meant. Stanley was again disappointed. It did not, he told Gollancz, mean anything: ‘I do not know that my picture is called anything. The lady on the waterlily leaf is a fairy if you please, and of course the boy on the bank is Edmunds, but honestly I do not know what the picture is all about. You might give the persons depicted a different name for every day in the week with special names for High days and Holidays.’5 ‘I was loving something desperately,’ he was to say of these years, ‘but what this was I had not the least idea. I took the first thing I came to and proceeded to draw it.’ His drawing, an honouring of the dawning in his awareness of the miracle of love, derived from deep personal feeling, still unclarified. He meant the figures to be universal. Was this not apparent? Did he really have to spell it out? How could he?

CHAPTER THREE

John Donne Arriving in Heaven

God will speak unto me, in that voice and in that way, which I am most delighted with and hearken most to. If I be covetous, God will tell me that heaven is a pearl, a treasure. If cheerful and affected with mirth, that heaven is all joy. If sociable and conversable, that it is a communion of saints.

John Donne: Sermon CXX, preached at St Paul’s.1

IT IS NOW 1911. Two Stanleys are emerging. The Stanley in the tangible world is exploring. His schooling, his reading, his discussions, particularly with his sisters as teachers and with his brother Sydney, begin to reveal that world to him at the physical level. The embryonic world-space of childhood Fernlea extends to the wider geography of Cookham village. The magic for Stanley of the one pervades the other. The cowls of the malthouses behind Fernlea rotate in the wind like the eyes of God. The blacksmith’s anvil rings like the cries of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. Known possessions of villagers, once treasured, appear miraculously as discards on the village rubbish heap. Builders mysteriously carry ladders to unseen destinations. Swans are caught, carpet-bagged for their annual marking, and trundled astonishingly down the High Street in wheelbarrows. Summer steam-launches disgorge hordes of excursionists on to the riverside lawns of the Ferry Hotel, beings as remote to Stanley as those who come for the annual regatta, effete young sprigs in boaters and blazers who lose their punt poles in the river, or fiercely athletic men who swim and row, both with elegant women in tow, whose new, less corseted Paris fashions startle: ‘In Cookham the idle rich have been having some sort of competition for the best bosoms and busts. Ladies patrol the streets boneless utterly. There is one thing, they keep the dogs from barking.’2

His family-feeling, the reciprocity of home, is tentatively projected outwards to the places and people of Cookham. The places become inwardly, privately, his. But many of the people are too individualistic to be absorbed. Sometimes he achieves response from them, often not. He views them occasionally with passion, frequently only in amusement or sardonically. If they are to be absorbed, they must die for him in their material form and be reborn as emanations from the place-meanings Cookham holds for him.

Places in Cookham mean specific spots – meadows, riverbanks, trackways, copses – in which he finds, or suddenly found, an ecstasy of sensation. He does not know why they bring such ecstasy, he only knows the sensation to be joyous and to spark creativity.

We swim and look at the bank over the rushes. I swim right in the pathway of sunlight. I go home to breakfast thinking as I go of the beautiful wholeness of the day. During the morning I am visited, and walk about being in that visitation. Now everything seems more definite and to put on a new meaning and freshness. In the afternoon I set my work out and begin my picture. I leave off at dusk, fully delighted with the spiritual labour I have done.3

Always the drawing came first. When he begins at last to paint – Two Girls and a Beehive (1910) is thought to be his first – he sometimes makes a preliminary wash to test the compositional effect. Then he often measures a pencil grid across the drawing with draughtsman’s exactitude. He covers the canvas with the equivalent grid scaled up and sketches the outlines of the drawing in their co-ordinated positions on the canvas. Working usually from one side or corner, he almost blocks in the paint to create solidity of form. In early paintings the paint is applied thickly, but later, in the heat of passion, sometimes so thinly that the underlying outline shows through or is reinforced. Oil was his favoured medium. He was virtually self-taught in its use, and later claimed that at the Slade he was given only three or so days’ painting tuition, working on a single model: ‘three days out of four years!’

After Will’s breakdown Ma won the right to promote her values rather than Pa’s in the upbringing of the youngest sons. She liked them to accompany her to Sunday worship in the village Methodist chapel. As the boys grew older, the fundamentalist nature of the chapel worship failed to provide the richer fare they needed. Stanley, on the road to discovering his ‘metaphysicals’, as Gilbert called them, pleads for help from Gwen:

You must understand that I have had a thorough grounding in Wesleyan Methodism. I have listened to a thousand sermons and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas. I have come out of the Chapel sometimes shaking with emotion. Gil and I used to get so excited that we could not face the prayer-meeting. By the time I had reached the prayer-meeting pitch I felt I was ready to break down. The end of the prayer-meeting was ghastly always, a man would say in a whisper: ‘Is there any poor wandering soul here tonight who has not heard the call of Jesus? He is passing by, passing by …’ A long pause. Of course, I used to feel that I had done wrong in not going up to the stand to acknowledge my conversion, as you are supposed to do. … About this there was a wretched clammy atmosphere, and it used to get well hold of you, and it has not gone yet.4

Among the books Gwen lent him was a selection of John Donne’s Sermons. Stanley could not grasp all their meaning, but was excited by a glimpse of spiritual nourishment which seemed to him to exceed the doctrinal exhortation which had been his gruel till then. The earthly joy his Cookham-feelings gave him must, he thought, be equations of the eternal joy which is the Christian celebration of heaven. Those places in Cookham which are associated with such joy must therefore be ‘holy’.

Widbrook Common is, Florence tells us, the heaven which John Donne approaches in Stanley’s next major painting, John Donne Arriving in Heaven. Reading John Donne, Stanley seemed ‘to get an impression of a side view of Heaven as I imagined it to be, and from that thought [fell] to imagining how people behaved there. … As I was thinking like this I seemed to see four people praying in different directions.’5 In the painting, heaven becomes an infinity in which the saints are placed in a compositional balance which reflects exactness of feeling.* The Common was a favourite picnic spot of the Spencers and well worth the walk there, even on a hot day, as Florence recounts:

Sutton Road [the main road towards Maidenhead from the ‘east end’ of the village] was an alleyed shadeless desert which must be traversed if one would win through to Widbrook Common, loveliest of commons, and when in the course of time … at Cliveden the old Duke of Westminster was succeeded by a gentleman named Waldorf Astor, the pilgrimage to Widbrook on hot summer days became well-nigh intolerable … for he stretched a glaring brick wall, of immense height it seemed to us, surmounted by broken glass, along Sutton Road, blotting out the view of Cliveden Woods which had until then helped our journey along. Mr Astor, familiarly known to us as Mr Walled-off Astor, was afraid, we were told, that his son would be kidnapped … perfectly preposterous in the familiar Cookham of our hearts.7

The wall must still be ‘traversed’ if one wishes to reach Widbrook Common, now a nature reserve. But the Common has no cliffs. These, Florence tells us, are derived from the same Thames riverbank which appeared in The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf. Since the two are geographically distant, Stanley is not being illustrative. He is not saying, ‘I see Widbrook Common as heaven.’ Instead he is assembling from his experience places in which he had mysteriously felt the sanctity of ecstasy, and is collaging or conjoining them to convey a feeling or concept of heaven. The places are not intended as symbolic or universal. They have no meaning outside his experience of them. He presumes we all have such places in our memories which evoke similar feelings for us, and that we are able to recognize that those he shows in his painting are but signposts to personal feeling. It is that feeling which he is trying to capture and to universalize.

Stanley presented his painting at the Slade for comment. It did not please Tonks, but it came to the attention of Clive Bell, who was setting up with Roger Fry the second of the two seminal post-impressionist exhibitions of those years in London. The first, in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries, had burst like a bombshell on a largely insular British public, creating a furore and dividing the art establishment into the reactionary and the progressive. Bell selected Stanley’s painting for inclusion in the 1912 exhibition also at the Grafton Galleries where in the English section it was hung with works by Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Henry Lamb and Roger Fry to match the corresponding works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky in the Octagon. Critics, viewing it, suggested that it indicated Stanley’s endorsement of post-impressionism. Some pronounced that he had not got it quite right.8

Once again Stanley was flummoxed. Others were defining his work by standards which had no meaning for him. The classifications of critics or art historians were their invention, not his. Stanley could be representative in so far as he took imagery from the real world; visionary in so far as he arranged it on the canvas in unexpected, often subconscious, juxtapositions; expressionist in so far as his aim was to convey personal emotion; symbolist in so far as he cast certain experiences in images which he will repeat as visual shorthand, and imitative in that he sought a visual style of the representational which, whether by instinct or example, came close in his early works to matching the attributes of impressionism. One such invoked the use of colour to replace the normal light and dark of shadow and sunlight, so that at its most exciting impressionist painting appears shadowless, its detail diffused not by light and shade but by luminous colour. In John Donne Arriving in Heaven Stanley used diffused colour in this way – except that he also inserted a sunlight which is fiercely low and hard, throwing pronounced shadows. Why? No doubt because he needed a device like the reflected flowers of The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf to point up an emotion in the painting which was of importance to him. The strongest shadow, that of John Donne himself, zigzags to emphasize the verticality of the riverbank. The cliffs could be barriers. John Donne can see heaven beyond them, but he has not yet attained it. He is, writes Stanley, ‘walking alongside Heaven’; as, we may assume, was Stanley himself as he quietly read Donne’s sermons and poetry.*

It is at this point that Stanley departs from post-impressionism. In its perfect forms such painting deliberately avoids kinesis, drama, the sense of the onward march of events. It asks no questions, suggests no answers. It may portray activity, even action, but seldom intent. Each picture is a snapshot of a moment caught with subtlety but without regard for past or future. Respectful though Stanley was of the intensity of its concentration, such stasis could never fully satisfy a young explorer desperate in a sensed world of miracles and mystery to record his moments of discovery and illumination.