Sir Stanley Spencer R.A.

Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill 28th November 1957 for £100.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, May 1955, cat. no.657;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part I- section 3) cat. no.8 (as Tombs of the Ming);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.235;
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, British Painting 1900-50, October 1967, cat. no.8;
London, Royal Academy, Stanley Spencer RA, 20th September - 14th December 1980, cat. no.265, illustrated p.218.

Maurice Collis, Stanley Spencer, Harvill Press, London, 1962, pp.228-30;
Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of Paintings,  Phaidon, London, 1992, cat. no.398, illustrated p.318-9;
Patrick Wright, The Guardian, 'Berkshire to Beijing,' 17th March 2001, illustrated p.1;
Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao's China, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p.466, illustrated pl.15.

The colours are much brighter and much less yellow than the catalogue illustration suggests. Original canvas. The surface has recently been cleaned and generally the work is in excellent original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a gilt plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

'That Ming Tomb painting will never happen to me again. It is charged with the feeling of the place.'
(Stanley Spencer in conversation with Tooth, quoted in Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer,  p.504)

Ming Tombs, Peking is one of two oil paintings Spencer completed during, or very shortly after, visiting the Ming Tombs in October 1954.  Like the second work, The Ministers, Ming Tombs, Peking,  (Government Art Collection, now hanging at the British Embassy, Beijing), it shows a view of the "Spirit Way" forming the approach to the Ming Tombs.  The site, which lies some 50 kilometres north of Beijing, holds the walled mausoleums of thirteen emperors of the Ming dynasty.  The tombs were built between 1409 and 1644, and are laid out in a circular valley according to the geomantic principles of feng shui.  Guarded by artificial mounds on either side, the "Spirit Way" is attended by a famous sequence of  monumental statues: ministers, warriors and then successive pairs of horses, unicorns, camels, elephants, lions and tigers, one of each pair standing, the other kneeling.

The Ming Tombs had long been well known as one of the great historical monuments of North China, but the long years of civil war had left them bereft and derelict. The British physicist, J. D. Bernal, who also visited in 1954, found one tomb scratched over with the graffiti of successive invading armies, with Irish scrawls mixed up with contributions by Austrian and Russian soldiers. Other British  delegates found trees sprouting through temples, some of which were also being used as threshing floors and stables. Spencer, however, concentrated on the Spirit Way.  In letters and notes written in China, or shortly after his return to Cookham, he praises "that lovely double row of animals", declaring the "wall-eyed" horses "particularly beautiful & moving", and notes that all the animals were "meant to be mourning for the Emperor".  He also reveals that he felt a painfully autobiographical resonance in those monuments, which seemed forlorn and abandoned despite the recent planting along the side of the approach, which suggest that New China's curators were already taking the place in hand.  

A few weeks after returning to Cookham, Spencer picked up a notebook and composed a "letter"  to his late wife Hilda Carline, expressing the wish that she had been with him in China. He also reminded her of the day in 1925, when they had got married in the village of Wangford in Suffolk.  After the guests had left, the newly-wed couple had gone for a walk down a lane.  They had paused and looked out over "a great plain", which they had imagined as the future landscape of the marriage they had just entered: its distant "shapes and forms" suggesting "various parts" of the life they would share.  They had likened that wide Suffolk plain to the Gobi desert then, but it  was also, Spencer now reminded Hilda, 'their place of the Ming tombs".  "We had seen photos of the place & we felt our together selves was like the remoteness of those animals".

Photographs taken by Denis Mathews, who accompanied Spencer on one of his visits to the Ming Tombs, suggest that he painted the scene as it appeared before him (fig.1). And yet in Spencer's imagination, those great creatures of stone were connected to the memory of that distant view of Suffolk, an the promise of a marriage he had betrayed when he opted for what he called "the-thief-getting-over-the wall dodge of divorce".  Like the cracked and chipped condition of the kneeling camel, the parched condition of that apparently abandoned historical landscape confirmed Spencer's personal sense of dereliction with regard to his late wife.

This catalogue note has been prepared by Patrick Wright, author of Passport to Peking: a Very British Mission to Mao's China (Oxford University Press, 2010).