Stanley Spencer’s spiritual soap opera
God is everywhere: details from Stanley Spencer’s The Angel, Cookham Churchyard (1934)
Stanley Spencer Gallery
On the eve of a new show, Deborah Nicholls-Lee untangles the many strands of Stanley Spencer’s life – faith, love and a search for the miraculous in the mundane
Sir Stanley Spencer CBE (1891-1959) proposed to his fellow painter Hilda Carline six times, repeatedly postponed the wedding and even once called it off, before the two were finally united in matrimony, 100 years ago, at Wangford parish church in Suffolk. The marriage, which was dissolved in 1937 after Spencer’s affair with his neigh bour Patricia Preece, a lesbian (they later had an unconsummated marriage), was famously described by Alfred Hickling in The Guardian as “the most bizarre domestic soap opera in the history of British art”.
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