Biography of sir stanley spencer

A highly eccentric and isolated figure, writers and art historians often brush quickly over Spencer's awkward and difficult work. He had two principle interests; sex and biblical narrative and the two sit quite jarringly and unsettlingly - sometimes even creating a perverse or sinister tone - when married explicitly together. Spencer's intention, like that of many artists, was to unite opposites - to align the body and spirit and the scared and profane in order to see the whole picture of life.

However, in Spencer's case, personally obsessed with sex due to unsatisfactory relationships, and with religion etched on the mind having had daily Christian stories recited at home as a child, his depiction of such subjects come with added intensity.

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Although Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art, he traveled home every evening to have dinner with his family and remained estranged from other influential artists of his day. He was profoundly affected by the experience of World War I, which shattered his insularity having previously only known the life of an idyllic childhood. As such, his story overlaps, at least in part, with that of the Polish-French painter, Balthus , who also uprooted from stability by the war, made particularly erotically charged pictures.

Although Spencer himself often stated that he was trying to create peace and redemption in his paintings, the affect on the viewer can often, paradoxically, be one of writhing dystopia.

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Sex-obsessed, jam-sandwich-eating, and outside-pajama-wearing - Stanley Spencer was the archetypal English eccentric. And his psychologically intriguing paintings represent an extension of this weird and wonderful personality. With its vivid colors and tone of joie de vivre , the early influence of Post-Impressionism, and more specifically, of Gauguin is overriding in this early work.

Although Spencer did not himself choose the subject - for it was specified that students of The Slade were to depict "Apple Gatherers" for their annual drawing competition - it does seem that, as is typical, the artist has infused an imagined scene with details from his own life. Spencer was one of nine children and here there are nine children and a monumental parental couple at the center.

It seems clear then that this painting is a family portrait. Indeed, he did himself refer to the painting as "my first ambitious work and I have in it wished to say what life was". As is commonplace for the artist, he expressed within an everyday earthly scene, a pantheistic connection between man, woman, nature, and fertility.