Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) explored fundamental issues of life with an urgency and persistence unique among British artists of his generation. His art comments on religion, love, sexuality, fraternity and community. Covering all aspects of Spencer's paintings, this original publication provides a comprehensive analysis of the artist's entire oeuvre.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Compton Verney Gallery, Warwickshire, June 25-Oct. 2, 2011.

Finding inspiration in his quiet village on the river Thames, early 20th-century painter Stanley Spencer drew on his familiar world to arrive at an art of epic grandeur--though often homely and weird. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy investigates Spencer's life, sets his work in its cultural context, and emphasizes the links between his life and his paintings--and sheds new light on this sensitive and enigmatic artist. 85 color and 30 b&w illustrations. .

Abridged version from the catalogue raisonné on one of Britain's most influential painters.

Autobiography of Unity Spencer, daughter of Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline.

The First World War is over, and in a quiet Hampshire village, artist Stanley Spencer is working on the commission of a lifetime, painting an entire chapel in memory of a life lost in the war to end all wars. Combining his own traumatic experiences with moments of everyday redemption, the chapel will become his masterpiece. When Elsie Munday arrives to take up position as housemaid to the Spencer family, her life quickly becomes entwined with the charming and irascible Stanley, his artist wife Hilda and their tiny daughter Shirin. As the years pass, Elsie does her best to keep the family together even when love, obsession and temptation seem set to tear them apart...

The remarkable English painter Stanley Spencer produced a series of works entitled Christ in the Wilderness (1939-54), portraying the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness. These beautiful and compelling images give us a startling insight into Jesus' vocation and his own understanding of his ministry. They show his great love for nature and affinity with all creation. In this attractive illustrated book, Stephen Cottrell reflects on five of the Christ in the Wilderness paintings, and reveals them to be a rich source of spiritual wisdom and nourishment. He invites us to slow down and enter into the stillness of Stanley Spencer's vision. By dwelling in the wilderness of these evocative portraits, Stephen Cottrell encourages us to refine our own discipleship and learn again what it means to follow Christ.

In this ground-breaking book, a theory of ’distortion’ - of the way in which the processes of human life are subject to interference, diversion and transformation - is developed by way of the art of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and that art’s public reception. Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spencer painted not only landscapes and portraits with loving detail but also the ’memory-feelings’ which he felt were a ’sacred’ part of his consciousness. Yet Spencer was also a controversial public figure, with some taking the view that his visionary paintings were ugly distortions of human life, even marks of an immoral nature. Examining how Spencer lived his vision, how he painted it and wrote it, and also how his attempts to communicate that vision were received by his contemporaries and have continued to be interpreted since his death, the author posits distortion as key: an intrinsic aspect both of human creation and of human interaction. What we intend to make, to say, to do and have done, often mutates in the process of being expressed or put into effect: we live amid distortion. Love - the affective appreciation of one another - is then a means by which we accommodate distortion and its consequences in our lives. An illustration, through Stanley Spencer’s story, of significant aspects of a human condition, this book will appeal across disciplines, including to art historians and students of Spencer’s work, as well as to scholars of anthropology with interests in creativity, perception and interpretation.

Stanley Spencer was one of Britain's greatest twentieth-century artists. This book tells the story of the artist's journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of a forgotten front, to his vision of peace and resurrection in Burghclere.

Stanley Spencer's paintings are detailed and vibrant and very often depict his deep but eccentric Christian beliefs. One of his greatest achievements were the murals painted in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, inspired by his war service and showing realistic scenes of everyday life in a war zone, with dreamlike visions drawn from his imagination. Throughout his life Spencer kept a series of journals, noting things down and sketching the things around him, and these journals are now in the Tate Gallery Archive. This book is the first of a three volume set where these journals (though abridged) are published for the first time. The journals give an insight into how Spencer thought and how he worked. Spencer received numerous awards and great recognition throughout his life and was knighted in 1958.