Sir Stanley Spencer, “The Bridge”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Tate Museum
Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.
Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and for the ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ series which was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Spencer’s work frequently combined real and imagined elements. As a result, his paintings have a strong sense of narrative even if the subject is not wholly explicable. He painted “The Bridge” in a temporary studio in the Fee School, Maidenhead. The subject is believed to be spectators watching a boat race, probably the annual Cookham Regatta. They are standing on an invented stone bridge instead of Cookham’s cast-iron bridge, although the decorative quatrefoil motifs are taken from the metal version. The Airedale terrier dog lying on the bridge was called Tinker. Tinker belonged to a Cookham resident, Guy Lacey, who taught Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert to swim.