Stanley Spencer Gallery extends opening hours for Winter Exhibition
16 October 2009
The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham is extending its opening hours from November as the doors open on its Winter Exhibition.
The gallery will open four days a week - a change from its usual weekends only opening - from November 5th until March 28th.
The Winter Exhibition includes 40 paintings and drawings by Stanley Spencer and a portrait of Spencer by Desmond Chute. It also features a number of oils from the collection, as well as pictures on long-term loan.
Spencer's talent as a portrait painter is exemplified in the Self-Portrait featured in the Winter Exhibition. Painted in oils in 1923 it is the second in a fine series of self-portrait drawings and paintings, from c1913 until his death in 1959.
Spencer was honest and uncompromising in recording the changes in his features as well as his feelings about himself. This second self-portrait originally sold for 20 guineas in Spencer's highly successful, first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1927.
In addition to the formal self-portraits, he appears many times in his subject pictures as a small, boyish figure depicted in generalised terms, along with people who played a role in his real or imaginative life.
Nine of the works in the exhibition relate to Spencer's army service, his years at Burghclere or his pictures in the Sandham Memorial Chapel, one of the most powerful and exceptional works of art to emerge from the Great War.
The Chapel itself, commissioned by the Behrends, commemorates his RAMC and infantry service in England and Macedonia during the war. Of direct relevance are his much-handled working drawings for the north and south walls (with additional details sketched in as he proceeded) and a drawing referring to his idea for "8 little pictures of incidents happening outside the door of a tent".
His years at Burghclere, painting in the Chapel, are also marked by his landscape of Beacon Hill and drawings of the maid Elsie, "When she was working for me at Burghclere our life was as light as the air," he wrote.
A collection of Spencer's letters are part of the Stanley Spencer Gallery collection.
The Winter Exhibition is open from November 5 to March 28, Thursday to Sunday, from 11am to 4.30pm at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, High Street, Cookham.
For more information contact Judith Diment on 07860 162313 or visit www.stanleyspencer.org.uk