Musings from the Backwater Blogger - From the artist's window 1938

Stanley Spencer, Great Britain, 1891-1959

From the artist’s window 1938

 I can’t help it with Stanley Spencer’s work, I am intrigued. How could one not be? He was eccentric, intense, apparently had a wonderful sense of humour, and was obsessed until death by his first wife Hilda. He maintained contact with both his wives (he never consummated his second marriage to Patricia Preece) and loved his village, Cookham, were he was born and spent virtually all his life.

The Haywards purchased four flower paintings by Spencer in 1938. I am drawn to them all but the one that fascinates me the most is From the artist’s window, Cookham 1938.  It seems so fresh and celebratory that it is hard to believe that at the time he painted it Spencer was struggling with so many demons which were manifesting themselves into a series of erotic paintings. This painting engages more than just my visual sense. I can feel the clean spring breeze that makes the lace curtains move gently and I can imagine the heady perfume of the jonquils (when they flower in my garden their rich smell always make me sneeze). That smell is mixed with the delicious odour of linseed oil, turpentine and oil paint. The jonquils are simply plonked into the enamel basin with some water and the space at the window seems ambiguous and precarious. Are the flowers just dropped there because Spencer is busy on one of the other flower paintings that is in the Carrick Hill collection? Or have all these flower paintings provided some kind of creative relief from the intensity of working on the erotic pieces? Maybe, as I look out the window past the bowl of jonquils onto the charmingly ordered world of Cookham’s rooftops, there is one of these great works behind me –  open, raw, alarming, confronting – as hard to look at as this still-life is easy.

Like so many works at Carrick Hill, the Stanley Spencer paintings hold a personal connection to the Haywards. The flower pieces link to Ursula’s garden, glimpsed from the windows of her home, and the blooms that regularly filled the house with their scent or rose up in a blaze of seasonal colour in the grounds around the house. Spencer was one of a number of British artists patronised by the Haywards, and Carrick Hill holds nine of his works - eight paintings and a lithograph. He is the most represented British painter in their collection, one of the largest groups of Spencer’s works outside Great Britain.  At the time that the Haywards collected these works (and at one time they also had at least one other) it would have been among the most significant private collections of this major artist’s oeuvre. How astonishingly forward-thinking they were.

Jane Hylton the Backwater Blogger