The passion of Stanley Spencer

By Lily Le Brun

Stanley Spencer painted his first oil painting when he was 19. “Two Girls and a Beehive” depicts the daughters of the local butcher standing beside a beehive in Spencer’s beloved home town of Cookham in Berkshire. The painting, Spencer said, fused his “desires”, which he defined as “the place, the girls, the religious atmosphere”. A new survey at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire shows how those teenage desires, both spiritual and prosaically sensual, remained present in his work up to his death in 1959.

Spencer always believed that he was “on the side of the angels and of dirt”. The Hepworth Wakefield shows us what he meant. The largest exhibition of Spencer’s work in 15 years, marking 125 years since his birth, “Of Angels and Dirt” pairs his paintings with quotations from his diaries, to demonstrate his life-long attempt to reveal the relationship between the sacred and the profane. From shipbuilding in Glasgow to a resurrection (of sorts), from candid nudes to well-tended gardens, all his work reflected his career-long conviction that “all is one religious life.”