This portrait drawing depicts Albert Symes, who was the first beneficiary to occupy one of the almshouses abutting the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Wiltshire. The chapel was the magnum opus of Spencer’s career, during the construction and painting of which the artist lived in Burghclere itself between May 1927 and January 1932. Through that period Spencer became acquainted with some of the villagers such as Symes and the builder W. G. (‘Bill’) Head, who was portrayed in another drawing made in the same month as this one. Both drawings were made on the eve of Spencer’s departure from Burghclere to live in Cookham, which occurred in late January 1932. According to an inscribed sketch in Spencer’s studio sale, held at Christie’s in 1998, he made at least one other unrelated drawing in Mr Symes’s sitting room at Burghclere.

This drawing was owned by Spencer’s patrons who financed the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Mary and John Louis Behrend. It was included in an exhibition of their collection held at the Leicester Galleries in 1962. They themselves lived in the village of Burghclere and would have been personally acquainted with Albert Symes. In a letter dated 19 December 1977, their son George Behrend explained the background to this portrait drawing: ‘Owing to constructing a chapel during the General Strike when people were short of houses, the two cottages were added to the Chapel whose first occupant was W. Symes who lost an arm and leg while building the railway whose track adjoins the cottage he insisted on having, next door to the Chapel’. When this drawing was sold at Christie’s in 1978, the sitter was identified as William Symes. However, when it was exhibited in 1962, he was identified as Albert Symes. Albert was born in 1865 and he was sixty-six years old in 1932 when this drawing was made—an age that is in keeping with the appearance of the sitter. Moreover, George Behrend’s remark about the railway construction worker can only refer to Albert Symes, rather than his son William (1886–1945), since the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton railway opened in 1885 a year before William was born.