Stanley Spencer
Set the Resurrection in a Berkshire churchyard and painted his village as the site of everything.
Stanley Spencer was born at Cookham in Berkshire in 1891 and lived most of his life there, which is the whole of his subject. He trained at the Slade, served in Macedonia, and painted the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere over five years — a cycle of army life, kit inspections and tea urns culminating in a resurrection of soldiers. The Resurrection, Cookham puts the dead rising from the graves of his own village churchyard. Later work included the Port Glasgow shipbuilding pictures made as a war artist and a set of frank, unsparing double nudes. He was knighted shortly before his death in 1959.
The religious and Cookham subjects are the core of the market, with the landscapes — which he painted to earn money and rather resented — more numerous and separately valued. Paintings are unique, usually oil on canvas. Drawings are numerous, highly finished and squared for transfer, since he worked out compositions fully on paper first, and those are collected in their own right. The Stanley Spencer Gallery at Cookham and the catalogue raisonne are the references. Signature is often absent from the face.
If you own a work by Stanley Spencer
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.