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In our five discussions, we will explore Stanley Spencer’s art and his world from five different perspectives. These will include:

Through his friendships and relationships.

Through his affinity with the English landscape.

Through his sexuality.

Through his unconventional faith.

Through his work relating to the Great War, which marked him profoundly in his after years, after his return from the war, where he had worked in the ambulance corps.

In this manner we will discover elements such as serious whimsy, a mannerism which he shares with the writer Virginia Woolf, and indeed Spencer existed for a while on the periphery of Bloomsbury.

Bloomsbury as one knows was a sometimes febrile gathering of competing sexualities and egos, and we will note how Spencer’s nudes which were once considered shocking may now be seen to prefigure some of the work of Lucian Freud.

We will also consider Spencer’s religious art, which reaches back before Raphael, and which is firmly located in the countryside around Cookham, where the resurrection seems both immanent and imminent. Perhaps, it is this unconventional Christian vision which sharpens his war art as well.

Come along and enjoy lively discussions of these topics and others