Goats, Switzerland depicts the herding of goats through the luscious mountain valley of Saastal in the Swiss canton of Valais. It is one of seven paintings that Stanley Spencer made after visiting Saas-Grund in 1933 and nearby Zermatt in 1935. The goats in the painting are Valais Blacknecks, a local breed distinguished by its colouring—dark brown in front, white behind—and prominent curved horns. The painting was composed from memory, and the markings of the goats vary somewhat from their appearance in life. A brief catalogue entry for Goats, Switzerland was included in Spencer’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1955, which included information provided by the artist: ‘This painting is based on two trips to Switzerland. The setting is at Saas Grund which he visited in 1933: the Stations of the Cross, one in each stone châlet, are on the old footpath to Saas Fee. In the summer of 1936 [sic] he stayed at Zermatt where herds of goats were a daily sight in the village.’

The painting encompasses a wide span including both the modest plants in the foreground and mountain summits high above. The perspective has been distorted to achieve this. In the lower half of the picture the vanishing point runs steeply from bottom right to middle left, while the upper half abandons conventional perspective as consecutive sections of the scene are juxtaposed in a flat, collage-like composition. The sky at the very top edge of the painting is only dimly visible, producing a convincing sense of a vantage point enclosed deep within the valley. In the foreground three goats are ravaging a vegetable patch. Beyond a dry stone wall, a road runs diagonally, tapering steeply upwards to the left and filled with a rowdy herd of goats moving across the scene. A goat has jumped onto the wall, followed by a young red-headed girl who attempts to disentangle it from a rope fence. Two baskets of loaves, ripe with Biblical connotations, are disturbed by two more goats. Verdant green pastures beyond are peopled with three peasant labourers and a white cow, which are cutting turf to create irrigation channels. Above and beyond, the steep slopes of a footpath are punctuated by eight white chapels with red doorways; these belong to the Kapellenweg (‘chapel trail’) that connects the neighbouring villages of Saas-Fee and Saas-Grund, and which is marked by fifteen wayside chapels that collectively represent the Mysteries of the Rosary (not the Stations of the Cross as the Tate catalogue suggested). A ninth chapel, larger and red in colour, is pictured apart from the rest: this is Maria zur Hohen Stiege (‘St Mary of the High Steps’). Just above a screen of narrow larch trees, the upper fringe of the tableau is filled with white-capped mountain tops. The full height of the composition is anchored by a sliver of domestic architecture, which fills the right-hand fringe of the painting.

Spencer’s visits to Switzerland in August and September 1933 and May 1935 were working holidays. They were sponsored by his patron Edward Beddington-Behrens, whom he accompanied and who ‘commissioned Spencer to paint landscapes in Switzerland in return for all expenses on the journey’. Having earlier been introduced to Spencer through his uncle Sydney Schiff, Beddington-Behrens had only recently become interested in Spencer after a visit to the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, Hampshire, which was decorated with the artist’s vast murals. Beddington-Behrens later wrote to Spencer’s biographer Maurice Collis explaining the reason for inviting his new friend to Switzerland:

"I invited him as I thought it would be an inspiration for him to visit a village like Saas Fé which can only be approached by mountain paths on a mule and where old village customs and dress were maintained and where the constant danger of the mountains to man and beast help maintain a strong religious belief."

Beddington-Behrens’s judgement was correct and Spencer responded warmly to this unfamiliar landscape and its inhabitants.

Spencer recounted with excitement certain aspects of the first visit in his letters. ‘I have done a little climbing & I am a very steady walker. We had to ride mules to get here, great fun.’ ‘There is a wealth of chapels extremely beautiful & all looking as if they might have cost five shillings to build.’ In a third letter he wrote: ‘I am working hard here for my daily bread’. Later, in 1937, Spencer wrote about his visits to Switzerland in a notebook: ‘Here and there in this broadside earth were little chapels only about ten feet square and looking like lumps of sugar-loaf in the distance. I loved this mixture of the religious life with the temporal life.’ Spencer’s mistress Patricia Preece, later his second wife, accompanied him on both visits in 1933 and 1935, and she later remembered the treacherous journey to Saas-Grund:

"Beddington-Behrens met me at Stalden, where the railway ended at that time. One had to continue by mule to Saas Grund, our destination. As the path mounted the view was magnificent. The world seemed all space, light and silence. The track narrowed, finally becoming a shelf cut out of the side of a precipice. To stumble would have meant death on the rocks hundreds of feet below."

Spencer made at least seven paintings of Swiss subjects including Goats, Switzerland. Two were purchased by Beddington-Behrens: Souvenir of Switzerland (1934, National Museum of Wales) and Geranium, A Street in Zermatt (1935, Private Collection). There is little documentary evidence to indicate which paintings were made in Switzerland and which were made subsequently, but there are indicative stylistic differences. The more naturalistic, finely grained paintings were likely made from life in Switzerland, while the exaggerated, multi-figure, narrative pictures were likely made from memory. One work, Swiss Skittle Alley: Saas Fe (1933, Private Collection), is documented to have been painted in Switzerland. It depicts a game of skittles played in the open air under strong, raking sunshine, with the foreground and midground filled by the bowling alley while characterful locals and vernacular buildings are situated in the background at the top of the composition. The other works probably painted in Switzerland are Alpine Landscape (1933, Vancouver Art Gallery), Geranium, A Street in Zermatt (1935, Private Collection) and Zermatt (1935, Carrick Hill Trust).

Spencer’s imaginative paintings of Switzerland are distinguished by their exaggerated characterisations of local figure types. Spencer explained to Beddington-Behrens why he preferred to paint from recollections and drawings: ‘It is much better than if I painted it on the spot because if I feel it sufficiently intensely to paint it from memory it has got to live.’ After returning home to England, in 1934 Spencer made a large triptych that celebrated and memorialised his recent holiday. Souvenir of Switzerland depicts a sweeping view of the landscape filled with figures, some wearing traditional dress and headwear, variously praying and labouring, and punctuated by the mountains, a gable-headed wayside crucifix and one of the Kapellenweg chapels. These prominent, vernacular expressions of local Christian custom appealed to Spencer, who had hitherto pictured his home village of Cookham as the setting for Biblical narratives. As with Souvenir of Switzerland, paintings such as Goats, Switzerland selectively combine aspects of local geography and custom in a strangely intense, fantastic vein. The same approach was adopted in Avalanche, Switzerland (1935–36, Private Collection), which depicts a woman and two children walking a snowy mountain path, the last child with a basket of bread on his back, while the heads of two women appear at the bottom right-hand corner, covered with the embroidered headcover that local women wore to church.

Goats, Switzerland has been exhibited and illustrated with the titles ‘Goats in Switzerland’, ‘Goats, Saas Fee’ and ‘Goats at Saas Grund’. It was first exhibited with the title ‘Goats, Switzerland’ in Spencer’s solo exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons in summer 1936, and again with that title at Spencer’s Tate retrospective in 1955. Spencer sent it to his dealer as part of a ‘batch of nineteen pictures’ in April 1936, and mentioned in a letter to Tooth that ‘Goats’ was one of ‘four you have not seen.’ This may suggest it was finished shortly beforehand in the spring of 1936. It was misdated to 1933 when exhibited at the Leicester Galleries as part of Louis Behrend’s collection in 1961.

Goats, Switzerland and another Swiss subject, Swiss Skittle Alley: Saas Fee, were bought from Tooth’s by Spencer’s long-standing friends and patrons Louis (1881–1972) and Mary Behrend. They became acquainted with Spencer through the artist Henry Lamb, buying paintings from him in the twenties and commissioning him to paint murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel, executed between 1927 and 1932, which commemorated Mary’s brother who died on active service in Macedonia during the Great War. Although they amassed considerable numbers of paintings by Spencer, Lamb and Stanley’s brother Gilbert Spencer, they also owned work by Walter Sickert, Philip Wilson Steer, Matthew Smith, Boris Anrep, Frank Dobson, Victor Pasmore, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant and Mark Gertler among others. The Behrends gave Goats, Switzerland to their son George Behrend almost immediately after they acquired it from Tooth’s, and it was sold in his sale at Christie’s in 1973.