Ed Vaizey Discovers Stanley Spencer & Christ Preaching In Cookham

The painter Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) spent most of his life in the Berkshire village of Cookham. This beautiful location now serves almost as a shrine to this quirky, eccentric and very English painter. The Stanley Spencer gallery is housed in the old Methodist chapel, which Stanley would have attended as a child with his parents. It has some hundred of his paintings. Wander around the village (especially with one of the excellent volunteer guides from the gallery) and you will see his childhood home, and many of the houses and even the magnolia tree (in full bloom when I visited) that he depicted in his paintings.

I love Spencer’s work, a sort of cross between the brutal portraits of Lucian Freud and the cartoonish characters of Beryl Cook. In fact, when I was the arts minister, a magazine asked me to choose my favourite painting. I selected Spencer’s Self-Portrait (1914), painted when he was 23, which hangs in Tate Britain – a haunting, dark and unsparing depiction of a troubled soul.

Except Spencer doesn’t seem to have been all that troubled. As someone who has always lived close to where I was born, I empathise with his determination to stay near to the familiar. He had a large family of brothers and sisters, and apart from a troubled marriage late in life, he seems to have been a popular figure and the very life and soul. He loved people. And he loved Cookham.

Detail from Stanley Spencer’s Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1952-9), private collection, on long-term loan to the Stanley Spencer Gallery.

The new exhibition at the Stanley Spencer Gallery gives the background to his unfinished masterpiece, Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta. The regatta was one of the highlights of the social season from the 1890s until about the 1930s. Thousands of people descended on the village to watch the boats of the ‘swells’ parade up and down the river.

Christ Preaching is a huge painting, permanently installed at the gallery, and rightly regarded, even in its unfinished state, as a masterpiece. Christ bends over on the barge, displaying the flexibility of a yoga master, preaching to assorted members of the local community on the evening of the Grand Concert. It was, according to Spencer, ‘everything to do with love. In that marvellous atmosphere nothing can go wrong’. A blend of Christ’s love for the world and Spencer’s love for Cookham and its people.

The painting was bought by Spencer’s patron Viscount Astor, and displayed at the RA’s Summer Exhibition a year after the artist’s death. It’s a painting everyone must see, and to be mundane for a moment, you can just hop on the Elizabeth Line and be in Maidenhead in 40 minutes. Relish the show, walk around the village, and then have tea at Cliveden, Spencer’s ‘local’. The most perfect summer day trip.

VISIT

That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta runs until 2 November at the Stanley Spencer Gallery (High St, Cookham, Maidenhead SL6 9SJ). stanleyspencer.org.uk