Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist by Peter Gough
Yale University Press, 2024
When one thinks of an English artist with the surname Spencer, it is Stanley who immediately comes to mind. However, his younger brother Gilbert, the subject of this new, definitive biography, was a fine artist in his own right, for too long overshadowed by his elder brother. In 1961 the art critic Eric Newton, reviewing a book that Gilbert had written about his brother, commented insightfully that “Gilbert and Stanley Spencer were more than brothers, they were affinities! A special key is needed for an acceptance of the deeper levels of Stanley’s art and that Gilbert possesses almost unconsciously.” As Newton’s observation makes clear, the lives and oeuvres of the brothers were closely intertwined, but although the younger Spencer had a long and distinguished career as an artist and teacher, he is less well known than Stanley. This book seeks to draw out both the differences and similarities between the brothers, and successfully argues that Gilbert should be primarily regarded as a fine artist in his own right, set apart from his brother. Gilbert, throughout his life, accepted the genius that his brother displayed —especially in his well-known Cookham murals— but carved out a distinctive path that is well worth celebrating.
The childhood of the two brothers was inextricably linked. While Gilbert was the youngest child of eleven, Stanley was just a year older, so that they were naturally very close. Stanley won a scholarship to the Slade and studied there from 1908 to 1912 under the tutelage of Henry Tonks. When Gilbert began to show similar talent after attending the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art, it was his elder brother who suggested that the Slade might be a good place for him to continue his studies. Gilbert subsequently attended the Slade from 1913 until 1915, also under the influence of Tonks, who remained an important figure to him throughout his career.
The Slade was, at that time, a school bursting with young talent. David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts, Isaac Rosenberg, Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington were all students there before the war. Gilbert left early in 1915, since the war had made the study of art increasingly irrelevant. Some art students joined the Artists Rifles while others simply enrolled in their local regiments. For the Spencer brothers, it was a difficult time. They saw Cookham emptied of men their age, yet neither felt able to join the fighting. It was Gilbert who first made the decision to train with the St John Ambulance and, encouraged by his mother, he enlisted with the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) and was soon on his way to the Beaufort War Hospital in Fishponds, Bristol.
Gilbert spent the next four years in various locations including Salonika and Alexandria, with many months on board the HMHS Letitia, a hospital ship which could carry more than five hundred injured soldiers. He was eventually demobilised in March 1919, and returned to Cookham and then to his studies at the Slade. In his four years of active service he had produced hardly any art at all; it was as if his artistic ambitions were on hold while he was occupied with caring for the war-wounded. Unlike many other artists who also experienced the war’s effects first-hand, Gilbert did not seem to carry the weight of his memories, in contrast to Stanley, whose wartime experiences recurred in his paintings even years later. However, within months of his return Gilbert was offered a commission by the British War Memorials Committee for a large commemorative painting. He was the youngest of the fifteen artists to receive the most valuable commission of two hundred pounds for a single painting, which perhaps reflects the potential that many saw in him. According to Gough, the commission came about when Muirhead Bone and Henry Rushbury, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, visited Cookham to inspect Stanley’s Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Stationat Smol, Macedonia, which had already been commissioned.
Gilbert’s resulting painting is interesting for several reasons. After four years of artistic inactivity, to produce such a large-scale work in oil was an achievement in itself. While there are obvious flaws in the completed canvas, there are also strengths. New Arrivals: F4 Ward, No. 36 Stationary Hospital, Mahemdia, Sinai shows the interior of a hospital ward with five wounded soldiers sitting on their beds. They occupy the centre of the painting, while to one side a nurse is looking at a register and at the other a soldier has arrived with a message in his hand. Gilbert has clearly recalled his own experience of such locations, and has neither glamourised the setting nor yet trivialised it. There is a quiet serenity about the work that is immediately apparent. In what would become one of the hallmarks of his later landscapes, its honesty overcomes the faults in design and execution.
In his account of the brothers after the war, Gough draws out some of the dilemmas facing artists in the post-war period. Prior to 1914 the leading artists were those who embraced modernity. In August 1914, for example, David Bomberg held his only one-man exhibition, in which he exhibited startling new works including In the Hold and Ju-Jitsu, full of future promise. However, the horrors of the war, and the technology that had made the mass slaughter possible, pushed many artists away from celebrating the modern world. While in Europe protest movements like Dada proliferated, in England there was —amidst an acute sense of desperation— a search for meaning in the world’s realities.
At this point the Spencers’ paths diverged. While Stanley remained at Cookham, Gilbert spent the next decade moving form place to place —Hampstead, Dorset, Reading, and finally Oxford, where he was given his first teaching post. He was made welcome at Garsington Manor, the country retreat of Philip and Ottoline Morrell. In the early twenties they hosted artists, poets, and philosophers at their estate, including Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, and Augustus John. Gilbert was often a guest, and painted several superb landscapes inside the grounds.
Throughout this period Gilbert’s art continued to develop, in both subject and execution. In 1928 he purchased a large canvas, 5 ft by 6 ft, for an anticipated commission to accompany a production of Othello at the Savoy Theatre. The commission failed to materialise but in 1930, with an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery planned for February 1932, he decided to return to the canvas. The resulting picture, A Cotswold Farm, broke decisive new ground.
For such a large composition, the structure of the painting is incredibly complicated. In the centre are two horse-drawn carts facing each other on the farmyard path. One is heavily laden with wood: sawn tree trunks and bound branches are piled high. The other seems empty, with the driver turning his horse to one side to avoid the obstruction in front of him. Surrounding this central motif are further images of farm life: doves fly from their dovecote, cattle stand motionless in the distant yard, hens can be seen in the hen-house and in the enclosure beyond the carts, and a circular saw-bench for cutting logs occupies the foreground on the left. As Gilbert himself acknowledged, this was not an image based on an actual farm but a composite drawn from memory of all that was familiar to him from Cookham and his life in Dorset. Despite this there is a reality to the picture that is very striking. Everything is accurate. The carts are drawn from life, as are the stone buildings that surround the central drama, and the whole has an authenticity both honest and yet unromantic. This is no idealised view of rural life but an accurate portrayal of a hard-working community at one with the environment. Gilbert had personal experience of the hardships of rural poverty, and in this painting there is no attempt to glamourise or romanticise country life.
Gough describes the 1930s as a decade of transition for Gilbert, and his account of the period shows that this is entirely appropriate. Late in 1930 Gilbert married —to everyone’s surprise— a former Slade student, Ursula Bradshaw. They remained happily married for the next thirty years, and Ursula was instrumental in Gilbert establishing a better relationship with his son (Peter) from a previous relationship. In 1932 he was able to supplement his insecure income from painting with a teaching position at the Royal College of Art, a post which he held until 1948. As he made clear in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Painter, he would always prioritise his art over teaching, and Gough makes clear that his impact on his students was limited, despite the amount of time that he spent at the College as Professor of Painting.
It was during this period that his painting style really developed. His landscapes were mostly painted en plein air, and he consistently maintained that he never reworked the canvases back in the studio. Thankfully, Gough’s book is heavily illustrated so that the reader is able to trace the progress that Gilbert made at this time in nurturing a distinctive style that referenced the historical heritage of English landscape artists such as Constable while also forging a unique pathway of his own. At first sight there is little that is striking about many of the rural scenes that Gilbert produced at this time. However, on closer examination and analysis, it becomes clear that the skill and care invested in framing these scenes and positioning the spectator within them were considerable.
Several illustrations in the book clearly show that Gilbert would often crowd the foreground with trees or other foliage, and then allow the distant background to disappear slowly from view. He also used man-made constructions – walls, fences, gates, planted hedgerows, even barbed wire— to divide the horizontal planes and separate the foreground and background into distinct spaces. Critics at the time commended his work as sympathetic to the landscapes depicted, but they often failed to appreciate his deliberate choice of locations that would allow him to achieve a natural result from which any romantic ideal was absent. Gilbert’s paintings from this time are masterful works of balance and precision that acknowledge and celebrate rural landscapes without any nostalgic evocation of a past golden age.
In 1932 Stanley was finishing his monumental series of decorations for the Sandheim Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, which are rightly regarded as his greatest artistic achievement. In the same year Gilbert was given his own commission to decorate a refurbished building for Balliol College, Oxford with an illustration of the life of its founder John Balliol. The murals there occupied him for the next two years, as he juggled the commission with his teaching at the Royal College.
Again the critics were unanimous in their approval of these paintings, as were the college authorities, who gave him an additional hundred pounds and a lifetime membership of the Senior Common Room! The mural scheme occupied the whole of the first floor and had to accommodate doors and windows, so Gilbert chose to split the design into seven parts. It begins with the Bishop of Durham being attacked and John Balliol hiding in the background; the Bishop is then mishandled, but is eventually rescued. Next we find Balliol tied to a tree about to be flogged, a scene followed by his wife giving money to some scholars to fund the new College. The mural cycle ends with the scholars gazing fondly at the spires of Oxford and then sitting at their desks, intently studying the chained books in front of them. However, what really marks out these murals as special is the detail which Gilbert has included, expressing both his humour and his humanity. In the background of one scene a chicken is enjoying a dust bath, while in another a cart holds ancient-looking cricket bats and tennis racquets. In the section showing Balliol’s wife handing money to the scholars, their names can be found on their baggage labels, which describe them as contemporary College Fellows.
Gough continues to outline the painter’s life through middle age and beyond. The Second World War presented Gilbert with many challenges, some of them very trying. The Royal College moved to the Lake District, where Gilbert had difficulty finding accommodation and became increasingly disgruntled, although he found some inspiration in his experiences with the local Home Guard. The War Artists’ Advisory Committee commissioned him for four paintings on the theme of service personnel, and he eventually produced a sequence showing Home Guard troops marching around the locality. Imbued with humour but also with respect for these volunteers, obviously ill-equipped to deal with an actual invasion, the works achieve a truthful balance. One in particular, Troops in the Countryside (1942), is especially noteworthy. A platoon of twelve soldiers are marching in lines of three along a country lane, while behind them a similar number of cows are grazing in blissful unawareness of the human presence in front of them. A broken wheel lies in the foreground on the right, near a gate which seems to be held together with rope or twine. It is a wartime scene of service personnel going about their duties but also a statement on the continuities of rural life, a theme that Gilbert repeatedly included in his later work.
In 1948 he was dismissed from his post at the Royal College, but soon found other employment, first as a head of department at the Glasgow School of Art, and finally at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. The last chapters of the book detail his final successes, culminating in his acceptance as a full member of the Royal Academy in 1959. He died in 1979, and as a kind of memorial six works of his were shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of that year. Since his death there has been no significant show of his work.
In the years following his passing, Gilbert’s reputation has diminished. While Stanley is now correctly regarded as one of our finest painters of the period, his brother is still something of an afterthought. However, this book demonstrates quite clearly that Gilbert was a painter of enormous talent and versatility. He has often been incorrectly thought of as a painter of rural idylls, celebrating a country life which was fast disappearing, but the many excellent illustrations in this book show that this assessment is far off the mark. His finest works are full of social commentary, subtle humour, and extraordinary humanity, combined with considerable technical and artistic skill. As someone who knew little of his work before reading this book, I now regard Gilbert Spencer as another important twentieth-century English artist whom we are in danger of seriously underestimating. With not a single solo exhibition since his death, it is surely time for the Tate or another of our major galleries to mount a large retrospective and restore the status that he so richly deserves.--Paul Flux
