Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’
Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life. People remember that he loved bread and jam and was obsessed with rubbish, that his sexual compulsions drove him to divorce the love of his life and marry a man-hating and gold-digging tease, and amid all this detail the tremendous seriousness of his work can be lost.
Undoubtedly Spencer made art out of his life, which accounts for some fairly strange nudes and odd allegorical pictures, but his paintings and drawings must be seen as art and not literature. They are not diary entries but marvels of pen and brush. Spencer was a superb draughtsman, always preferring drawing to painting, considering the real work over when the compositional drawing was complete, and likening the addition of colour to knitting. This pen and ink ‘Study for Joachim among the Shepherds’ is in fact far more accomplished and pictorially interesting than the oil Spencer made from it in 1913. The best of his paintings, however, achieve a fully realised integration of paint and image, the paint bringing something to the iconography that drawing alone could not supply.
Here we have shepherds, a solitary sheep and the father of the Virgin Mary — not a bad start for a Christmas painting. I have chosen this beautiful drawing rather than, say, Spencer’s 1912 painting ‘The Nativity’, partly for its greater clarity and lucidity, but also because it stands slightly to one side, aslant from the Nativity theme. Spencer himself, with his uncompromising beliefs and intensely personal religion, was always at a slight angle to the accepted norms of human behaviour, and it seems fitting to represent him here with a less expected subject for Christmas contemplation.
The drawing was inspired by Spencer’s love for the paintings of Giotto, which he knew through reproduction in such books as the sixpenny ‘Gowans and Grey’ series, and Ruskin’s Giotto and his Works in Padua. Illustrating the fresco ‘Joachim retires to the Sheepfold’, Ruskin described how Joachim determined to withdraw from bad company and go to the desert places among the mountains, calling about him his flocks and shepherds and departing with them to the hills. Spencer chose to depict the moment when Joachim appeared to the shepherds, inevitably foreshadowing another, more momentous, appearance to shepherds, when glad tidings of great joy were brought.
The pair of shepherds with their backs towards us have just arrived. Joachim is the distinguished-looking bearded gent on the right, materialising round the fence as if emerging from the wings on to the stage of the drama. The place in which they are depicted is a strange mixture of confined outdoor and threshold indoor space. The reed fence or wall on the right of the drawing suggests some form of habitation, yet the main part of the picture space is overgrown with thickets and briars. What appears to be a young fig tree shades the recumbent sheep. In the distance a tree-lined hedge encloses an open space beyond the foreground foliage. The four main figures are surrounded on all sides, shut in by a combination of natural and man-made barriers. Instead of this being a landscape format, spreading out horizontally as might be expected of a pasture, it is a tight near-square composition, focused closely on the figures it contains. Revealingly, none of them makes eye contact. There is a consequent tension to the drawing’s structure, a build-up of emotional power that stops just short of menace, but suggests a certain complexity or ambiguity of feelings.
The scene can be identified as the water meadows beside the Thames at Cookham, the Berkshire village that was Spencer’s beloved home. Some years after he made the drawing he explained his way of working.
I like to take my thoughts for a walk and marry them to some place in Cookham. The ‘bread and cheese’ [a country name for hawthorn] hedge up the Strand ash path was the successful suitor. There was another hedge going away at right angles from the path and this was where the shepherds seemed to be. We had to walk single-file along this path and the shadows romped about in the hedge alongside of us. And I liked the hemmed-in restricted area feeling in that open land.
Here is Spencer’s lifelong fascination with boundaries and barriers, and, of course, transgressing them.
Spencer talks of the path to Strand Castle in Cookham as the place ‘where the shepherds seemed to be’, as if he had seen them there in a vision. And indeed there is something visionary or mystical about his early work, which has much in common with the pastoral and Romantic vision of Samuel Palmer. It is a spiritual, inhabited landscape, full of Spencer’s ‘feeling for things being holy’. He identifies with the Bible stories, transposes them to Cookham, and enters fully into them. The setting of this drawing has all the hallucinatory sharpness of a waking dream, a holy place of the imagination.
The first world war expelled Spencer from the earthly paradise of Cookham and, though he returned there afterwards, things could never be the same, for he had lost his innocence. Although he was to go on to produce some of his greatest masterpieces, including the magnificent cycle of mural paintings for the Oratory of All Souls at Burghclere (1927–32), he was never to recapture the purity of feeling — the sense of communion between man and his environment — that he had once so effortlessly celebrated. His vision grew darker and more personally tormented, filtered through the anguish of broken relationships and frustrated hopes. His religious feelings became inextricably bound up with his desires, and he planned a great installation of his paintings in a special building to be called ‘Church House’, in which the visitor would be encouraged to ‘meditate on the sanctity and beauty of sex’.
There is much to be said in favour of a fusion of the domestic and the sacred, but Spencer was never quite able to reconcile the various impulses that drove him. His ambitions were all-inclusive (‘I am on the side of angels and dirt,’ he proclaimed), and his robust, celebratory art is essentially a generous and nurturing vision. As Spencer said to fellow-artist David Jones, ‘All must be safely gathered in’; Jones subsequently remarking, ‘a more apt expression of the artist’s business I never heard’.
Comments