Sir Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959)
Stanley Spencer was born in 1891 in Cookham, the idyllic Berkshire village in which he spent most of his life, and with which his work is intimately linked. Brought up in an erudite, highly talented and musical family, the penultimate of nine children and taught at home by his music teacher father and elder sisters, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1908. Under the tutelage of the famed Henry Tonks and counting amongst his contemporaries and friends Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Christopher R. W. Nevinson, Spencer quickly rose to prominence and Roger Fry included his work in his seminal Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Spencer spent WWI working in the Royal Army Medical Corps, first in Bristol and then in Macedonia and the European Front Line. The horrors he saw during WWI had a profound effect upon Spencer's work, and precipitated some of the acknowledged masterpieces of his career including the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere. Spencer married Hilda Carline in 1925, with whom he had two daughters. Hilda, alongside his second wife, Patricia Preece whom he married in 1937, were of immense importance to Spencer's work, acting as both models and muses. During WWII, Spencer again worked as an Official War Artist, painting the shipbuilders on the Clyde in Glasgow. Spencer was made a Royal Academician in 1950, awarded a CBE in the same year and knighted in 1959. Major retrospective exhibitions were held during his lifetime at the Tate in 1955 and the Arts Council 1954-5. Spencer died in 1959, and the Stanley Spencer Gallery was opened at Cookham three years later.
Arguably the most important British artist of the twentieth-century, Stanley Spencer's unique, deeply original, visionary art combined the picturesque everyday of village life in rural Britain with poetic Biblical scenes and idiosyncratic, shockingly modern sexuality. Prolific in many genres, he is as much remembered for his devastatingly powerful war work as his depictions of bucolic English countryside, for his epic religious tableaux set in Cookham, his portraits of distinguished friends and patrons, the hyper-realistic, proto-Lucien Freud nude portraits of Hilda, Patricia and himself, and his monumental projects including Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde cycle at the IWM. Major retrospective exhibitions have been staged at the Courtauld Art Gallery (2013), Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2013), Stanley Spencer Gallery (2013, 2014, 2015), York Art Gallery (2009), Laing Art Gallery (2008), Tate Britain (2001), Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. (which toured to Mexico and California) (1997), Arts Council touring exhibition (1981), and the Royal Academy (1980). His work is held by international museums and galleries including Tate, MoMA; New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, the National Gallery of Canada; Ottowa, the Stedelijk Museum; Amsterdam, and the National Gallery of Canada; Ottowa amongst many others.
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The Nobile Index Series
Box Set Various, 2017Box SetRead more
Publisher: Piano Nobile Publications
ISBN: 978-1-901192-49-0
Dimensions: 28.4 x 16.4 x 4.7cm -
Auctioning Stanley Spencer
A Sales History 1990-2015 Sophie Hatchwell, 2017Sewn, 36 pagesRead more
Publisher: Piano Nobile Publications
ISBN: 978-1-901192-41-4
Dimensions: 16 x 28 x 1 cm -
20th Century Modern British Art
Developments in Modern British Art 2013Booklet, 8 pagesRead more
Publisher: Piano Nobile Publications
Dimensions: 15 x 20 cm -
A Crisis of Brilliance
Five Young British Artists and the Great War David Boyd Haycock, 2009Softback, 386 pagesRead more
Publisher: Old Street
Dimensions: 20 x 13 x 3 cm
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British Art Fair 2018
Saatchi Gallery 20 - 23 Sep 2018 Art FairSTAND 16 Piano Nobile is delighted to be exhibiting at the British Art Fair, previously known as the 20/21 British Art Fair. The fair returns for its 30th Anniversary in...Read more -
20/21 British Art Fair 2017
St. James's, London 13 - 17 Sep 2017 Art FairPiano Nobile is delighted to be returning to the 20/21 British Art Fair 2017, which runs from Wednesday 13 - Sunday 18 September.Read more -
Masterpiece 2017
The Royal Hospital, Chelsea 27 Jun - 5 Jul 2017 Art FairStand D19 Piano Nobile is pleased to be returning to Masterpiece for 2017. London's leading arts and antiques fair will be at The Royal Hospital Chelsea from 29 June until...Read more -
Masterpiece 2016
Royal Hospital Gardens, Chelsea 28 Jun - 6 Jul 2016 Art FairPiano Nobile returns to Masterpiece for 2016 with Modern British, International and Contemporary art for sale.Read more -
20/21 British Art Fair
Royal College of Art 9 - 13 Sep 2015 Art FairPiano Nobile will exhibit at the 20/21 British Art Fair in September 2015.Read more -
Paul Nash: Watercolours, 1910-1946
Another Life, Another World 9 Oct - 22 Nov 2014 Piano NobileOpening in October 2014, and marking the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, Piano Nobile is delighted to present an exhibition celebrating the work of Paul Nash (1889-...Read more