Stanley Spencer valuation
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.
What a work by Stanley Spencer is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 30 June 1891, Cookham
- Died
- 14 December 1959, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital
More on Wikipedia.
Cookham, Burghclere and the Bell catalogue
The Stanley Spencer Gallery opened in 1962 in the former Wesleyan chapel on Cookham High Street, which Spencer had attended as a child with his mother, and the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere is looked after by the National Trust. Between them they show the village pictures and the war cycle in the places they belong to.
Keith Bell's Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, published by Phaidon in 1992, lists more than five hundred paintings and is the reference for any oil. The drawings are outside it, so for a drawing the exhibition history, the link to a known painting and the provenance carry more weight. A painting that is not in Bell needs a clear account of where it has been.
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.
