Paul Gough’s illustrated biography of Gilbert Spencer is the first book to recount the life and career of a long-overlooked twentieth-century British artist. A painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher and writer whose career spanned more than six decades, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation. His reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet, Gilbert’s fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.
Through these six landscapes, Paul Gough shares some insights into Gilbert’s rich and creative life. Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist publishes on 23 April and is available for pre-order.
1. Sashes Meadow, Cookham, 1914–19. Oil on canvas 45 x 61 cm. Tate, London
Sashes Meadow was started in 1914 while Gilbert was a student at the Slade School of Art, but not completed until he had been demobilised from military service as a medical orderly in Egypt. Purchased by Sir Augustus Daniel from the artist in October 1919, and subsequently acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1951, Sashes Meadow with its plunging tonal extremes and dense repoussoir of foliage, is a sophisticated landscape for a relatively untested hand. Thirty years later it still had the power to astonish unprepared viewers, as one wrote, the painting threw ‘a new light on this versatile painter. The perfect control of the swirling water against a background of old crimson and quiet grey is like a seventeenth century lyric.’
2. Mill Pond, Durweston, 1927 Oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Recovering from their war service, Gilbert and Stanley gladly accepted an invitation from Henry Lamb in summer 1920 to join him on a painting trip to Dorset. With Lamb then living in the village of Stourpaine, the brothers stayed a mile or so across the valley of the Stour at Durweston. Despite their forays into the Berkshire landscape before the war, this was their first opportunity to paint for a sustained period directly from nature, and each day the three worked alongside each other, where a spirit of fraternal rivalry prevailed. Although subsequently Stanley summarily dismissed his outdoor paintings – I ‘hated doing landscapes’ he wrote to Hilda Carline in July 1923 – Gilbert sensed that here, on the gentle wooded slopes of the Stour, he had found his element. He felt a natural affinity to the open vistas, the variegated colours and subtle textures of the Dorset landscape, and the idyllic scenery would draw him back summer after summer for decades. It was during one of these seasonal sojourns that Gilbert painted his richly tonal painting of the Durweston Mill Pond, now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
3. Garsington Roofs, 1924. Oil on canvas, 47 x 62 cm. Private collection, photograph courtesy Bonhams
Cosily ensconced with the Morrell circle in the Manor at Garsington in the mid 1920s, Gilbert’s time in Oxfordshire nurtured an air of experimentation, culminating in the assured composition Garsington Roofs of 1924. With its high key palette and generous cast shadows, the canvas marked a notable shift in his pictorial language. Gone were the dense tonalities, the muddy browns and ochres that characterised the impasto surfaces and forceful brushwork of his Dorset work. Here his work took on a lighter touch, the paint applied more thinly, the wispy branches and twigs described with greater sensibility and delicacy, distant horizons suffused in golden yellow. Now in his mid-thirties, Gilbert had hit his stride: he had found his creative voice. A painting as accomplished and confident as Garsington Roofs bespeaks an individual of authority and marked self-assurance.
4. A Cotswold Farm, 1930-31. Oil on canvas, 141 x 184.1 cm. Tate, London
A slow worker, and fretful because of it, Gilbert assembled 43 drawings and 45 paintings for the exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1932. At the epicentre of this solo show was A Cotswold Farm, a complex figure composition nearly one and a half metres high and two metres across, which was the keystone in the exhibition’s architecture. Priced at three hundred and fifty guineas, its monetary value dwarfed the other works in the show, and it made a powerful impact on buyers and critics alike. When later displayed on the walls of the Royal Academy no fewer than seven national newspapers reproduced it in black and white, with Punch running a satirical cartoon derived from Gilbert’s composition over the caption: ‘So this is why farming doesn’t pay!’
Many characterised the composition as a rustic equivalent of Ford Madox Brown’s Work, an iconic Victorian vision that had lionised labour while calling out the deep inequities in the social order. To the art critic of Morning Post, Gilbert’s ‘Masterly landscape [was] a magnificent achievement, which ought to be acquired for collection. This would be an adequate reward for a work of great sincerity, courage and technical skill.’
5. From My Studio, 1959. Oil on canvas, 64 x 79 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London
Elected as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1950 and a full member a decade later, Gilbert had become known for his quiet and poetic renderings of the southern English countryside, especially those places where vegetable gardens and allotments overlapped with a more expansive view. Acutely conscious of the human effort that was required to maintain such places, Gilbert remained fascinated by the temporary structures – sheds, coops and hen houses – that littered farmyards and their environs, and enjoyed arranging the fences, railings and gateways to create a narrative tension and to lead the eye into the middle-distance. ‘It is in his landscapes’, noted one reviewer, ‘that Mr. Spencer appears happiest. Though often he sees the scene past a weed-footed fence, over-emphasises (one might consider) an empty foreground, the result is invariably marked depth and interest. And his sensual enthusiasm over what he sees is very obvious, catching up the looker over his shoulder.’
6. The Progress of Husbandry, c.1964, Oil on canvas. 91.4 x 118.6 cm. Tate, London
His last large canvas at over one metre high by two in width, Gilbert regarded this composition as a near definitive statement about the history – and future – of farming in England. An unashamedly nostalgic image, it illustrates the evolution of husbandry from an ancient Briton scratching the earth to the introduction of mechanised machinery. At the centre of the nine vignettes, two work horses are led away from a seed drill for the last time, while a tarpaulin is drawn over the now redundant machine like a shroud over a deceased body. In an ahistorical juxtaposition in the centre of the painting, three Tolpuddle Martyrs angrily remonstrate with the recalcitrant landowner, while in the foreground two wagons depart the scene; from the right hand corner, drawn by a mechanised tractor, young children wave wistfully at times gone by, never to return. A countryman at heart, Gilbert Spencer revered the honest industriousness of the rural labourer while striving to capture in paint the ambience of a landscape in constant evolution. His works, wrote one obituarist, ‘not only depict the countryside which by upbringing he loved so much but somehow convey their period. He might well be called the John Constable of the twentieth century.’
Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist publishes on 23rd April and is available to pre order now. Purchase from Yale and get free postage (UK only), or find it in your local bookshop.
About the author
Professor Paul Gough is Vice-Chancellor of Arts University Bournemouth. He is a painter, with work in national collections, and a broadcaster for television and radio. His publications include monographs on Stanley Spencer, John and Paul Nash and the street artist Banksy.
