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.
Here, Spencer shows her quite overcome on the pavement. The woman holding the rack of postcards is Annie Slack, the shopkeeper, and an angel is reaching up to choose one of Cookham Church to comfort her. Another angel displays samplers which look like rose pictures but on closer inspection one reads “Seek and You Shall Find” and another “God is Love”. So the painting is grounded in the everyday world but that world is itself awash with angels. The painting shows something of Spencer’s idiosyncratic perspective, which sometimes feels as if it's the world seen from above.
Amy Lim, one of the curators, observes that his perspective was never a technical or intellectual exercise: “Spencer had only one foot on the ground; the other was in another realm.” The profane and the sacred were never separate; he had a profoundly incarnational sense of the divine.
Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk runs until 22 March 2026 at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury
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