Stanley Spencer 1891-1959

In March 1940, Stanley Spencer travelled to Glasgow to begin work on a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. For the next five years, he made numerous trips to the city while developing a series of panoramic paintings of shipbuilders working on the Clyde. Despite Spencer’s initial enthusiasm for the project, he was troubled that there was some further, spiritual aspect of the city and its inhabitants he had yet to express. One night when out walking, he found a new source of inspiration. ‘I walked up along the road past the gasworks to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope…I seemed then to see that it rose in the midst of a great plain and that all in the plain were resurrecting and moving towards it…I knew then that the resurrection would be directed from this hill.’ 1
Just as the Holy Trinity Church in Cookham had provided the location for his career-making The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924 – 27, the Port Glasgow cemetery became the setting for a spectacular new body of work on the theme of the resurrection. Spencer’s initial plan for one 40-foot-long painting and five further pictures was scaled back at the request of his dealer Dudley Tooth, eventually becoming nine works, four of them triptychs. He painted the first two, The Resurrection: Reunion and The Resurrection: Waking Up, in Glasgow in 1945, completing the series back in Cookham.
Here we see the dead at the point of waking, stretching and yawning, as if this were an everyday occurrence. In 1950, Spencer explained, ‘In the central panel, there are two mourners on a cast-iron seat (…) I wanted to stress the idea of the seat being somewhere in the cemetery made especially for the living and now used at the resurrection by these visitors, just as they have used it time and again when they came to sit there and think peacefully and hopefully about those lying near them. They are not disturbed by the resurrection but, because of the joy they feel at the peace of it, remain where they are.’ 2
In Waking Up, we find a conflation of the seasons – an elderly gravedigger scoops up autumn leaves while, as the dead rejoin the living, spring-flowering primroses and summer convolvulus burst into life. Spencer has painted every inch of the canvas with an obsessive detail reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, the side panels a tangle of arms and legs, in which the women’s patterned dresses merge with the ground where they were just sleeping.

1 The artist cited in Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer, Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon, Oxford, 1979, p69
2 The artist cited in The Faber Gallery, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945 –1950), Faber and Faber, 1951, p15

Provenance

Mrs M. Corble, 1950
Thence by descent to Mrs Ann Neville in 1954 (daughter of the above)
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
Private Collection, UK

Exhibitions

London, Royal Academy of Arts, 182nd Summer Exhibition, 29 April – 7 August 1950, cat no.566

London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Ten Decades: A Review of British Taste 1851 – 1951, Arts Council of Great Britain, 10 August – 27 September 1951, cat no.250

London, Tate Gallery, Stanley Spencer: A Retrospective Exhibition, 3 November –18 December 1955, cat no.69

Cardiff, Llandaff Cathedral, Stanley Spencer: Religious Paintings, Welsh Arts Council, 15 – 25 June 1965, cat no.22, touring to:

Bangor, Haverfordwest and Swansea, until September 1965

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Stanley Spencer RA, 20 September – 14 December 1980, cat no.237, illus b/w p198

London, Barbican Art Gallery, Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love, 24 January – 1 April 1991, cat no.54, illus colour pp80 – 81

London, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Stanley Spencer, October 1992, cat no.17, illus colour across a two page throw out, detail of left panel illus colour full page front cover 

London, Christie's, Sacred Noise, 25 June – 21 July 2018, illus colour unpaginated

Literature

Britain To-Day, July 1950, pp36 – 37
The Faber Gallery, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945 – 1950), Faber and Faber, 1951, Spencer’s description of the work p16, illus colour pl.7
Maurice Collins, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Harvill Press, London, 1962, pp190 – 200
John Rothenstein, Stanley Spencer: The Man, Correspondence and Reminiscences, Paul Elek, London, 1979, pp10, 85, 112, 125, 130, 134 – 5
Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1979, pp65 – 71
Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer RA, Royal Academy of Arts, 1980, pp196 – 199
Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Collins, London, 1991, pp445, 450, 467
Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London,1992, cat no.358c, pp195 & 491, illus colour pp196 – 197