The countryside comes alive with Stanley Spencer 1891-1959

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Cottages at Burghclere

Stanley Spencer allows reality to dominate in his silent landscapes & intimate portraits.  My landscapes, he once wrote, are places waiting for their figures.  "My landscapes compared with my other work are carried out with a hard relentless persistence and dogged determination to go through with it, which gives them a competent and finished but lifeless and hard look," he complained. Once Spencer injects figures into his landscapes, they become stories & reality gets distorted.  "Distortion arrives from the effort to see something in a way that will enable [the painter] to love it."  Stanley Spencer, out of Sermons by Artists (1934)

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Cookham Farm Gate 1950

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Old Tannery Mills, Gloucestershire 1939

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Chestnuts

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Rock Gardens, Cookham Dene

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Cows

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Buttercups in a Meadow

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Apple Gatherers 1912-13

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Landscape in North Wales

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Gardening

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Cockmarsh Hill Cookham 1935

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Saint Francis and the Birds

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Scarecrow, Cookham 1934

 Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891-1959) Sunflower and Dog Worship 1937

Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) Cookham