Stanley Spencer sought signs of salvation in the everyday. His canvases, on display at Somerset House in London, are among the most arresting images of the First World WarThere is nothing ironic about the title of the exhibition “Heaven in a Hell of War”, which brings the 16 paintings which Stanley Spencer executed for Sandham Memorial Chapel, in Burghclere, Hampshire, to Somerset House, London (to 26 January 2014), on loan while the chapel is refurbished. For here, the horror and death which the artist witnessed on the Macedonian front in the First World War are transformed by humanity and compassion and infused with Spencer’s own religious sensibility. Indeed, far from ironic, the title is literally true: for, as Spencer said, for him, the battleground is “a happ