The art of Stanley Spencer was unique, not only in its disconcerting perspective and vivid sense of place, but in its depiction of the sacred in ordinary English life. Few painters since William Blake could so easily envision the Kingdom of Heaven entering an English village.
A new exhibition, Love and Landscape: Stanley Spencer in suffolk, shows his connection with the county, but the place that held first place in his heart was his native Cookham, where many of the paintings in the show are situated. One is The Angel, Cookham Churchyard, another is Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors. Painted in 1933, it depicts a recollection by Stanley Spencer’s father of an old lady, Granny Tubb, who was so discombobulated by seeing Halley’s Comet or some other celestial phenomenon (the story varied) that she ran out of her house and knelt down and prayed in the village street, thinking it was the Day of Judgment – about which we reflect in Advent.
