Sir Stanley Spencer, R.A.

Asa Lingard, 1936
B.N. Brahams
Sale, Christie's, 4th November 1966, lot 95 (as Cookham Hillside, Portrait of Sylvia)
Piccadilly Gallery, London
Ivor Braka, Ltd
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, where acquired by the family of the present owners in 1982

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Contemporary British Painters, 1935, cat. no.53 (as Hillside, Cookham);
London, Piccadilly Gallery, Sir Stanley Spencer RA 1891-1959: A Collection of Paintings and Drawings, September 1978, cat. no.4, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Collins, London, 1991, p.328, illustrated p.331;
Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon Press, London, 1993, cat. no.184, illustrated p.328.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd, 14 Masons Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BU. EXAMINATION / TREATMENT REPORT UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas has been lined and this is providing an even and secure support. There is, however, no obvious reason as to why the canvas might have been lined. Paint surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer and could perhaps benefit from surface cleaning. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows minimal retouching. These are: 1) very small touches in the sky between the central trees, 2) one thin line and one small spot on Patricia's hair, and 3) small retouchings on her neck. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in good and stable condition and might benefit from surface cleaning and revarnishing. Please contact the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about 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."

'Then I went to just along by the big nut trees below the gravel pit, just before you get to Cockmarsh Hill, and there I wanted to do a landscape that was to be a mixture of those deserted spots where there are one or two straggly bushes and harebells and purple thistles inhabited by rabbits, only this time I wanted this place to be as unobtrusively inhabited by Patricia whose hair was to join in the expression of the hot sultry summer sun as also I wished the necklet of diamonds and amethysts to mix and look as natural as the purple thistles.' (The Artist, writings in Tate Gallery Archives 733.2.30)

The presence of Patricia Preece in Spencer's paintings is almost always forceful. She parades in furs in The Meeting (Private Collection), sits serenely overseeing the action around her in Separating Fighting Swans (Leeds City Art Gallery) or takes a dominating centre stage in the portraits of her, be she clothed or nude. From the early days of Stanley's infatuation around 1931 to the disaster of the wedding and 'honeymoon' in St Ives in 1937, Patricia was a constant in his art and life.

Until around 1933 it seems that the friendship between Stanley and Patricia was relatively inoffensive, with Patricia perhaps rather flattered and amused by it, and indeed in that year she was to sit for a portrait by Hilda. However, the balance was shifting and by 1935 his relationship with Hilda was becoming increasingly strained, whilst that with Patricia was moving deeper. Whilst it is now almost impossible for us to divorce our knowledge of the later events and the fraught and entangled position that developed between Spencer, Hilda and Patricia after 1937, it is clear that to Spencer at least, and probably also to Patricia, in 1935 there is some sort of harmony in place. Patricia's position is problematic to establish with certainty. Hilda was by this point spending more and more time in Hampstead, apparently seeing her marriage to Stanley crumbling before her eyes. With her out of the immediate vicinity, Stanley was at liberty to make Patricia the focus of his attentions. He had already been showering Patricia with presents of expensive jewellery and clothes which she seems to have accepted happily but it is difficult to see exactly how far their relationship had developed. Whatever the truth of this, it is clear that Stanley's vision of it differed rather from Patricia's.

For Stanley, Patricia had come to represent something that embodied a variety of elements, many of them seemingly the diametric opposite of those he found in Hilda. He began to identify Patricia with Cookham itself, bringing his feeling for the place and the person together and imbuing his thoughts of her with the exquisite delight in his home town that he had felt in his youth and had sought to express in his early paintings and drawings. Having become convinced that he had lost this vision with the passing years, the potential to recapture it through his relationship with Patricia was embraced wholeheartedly, and Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill evokes to perfection this identification in his mind, in a way that almost no other image of Patricia achieves. Her pose is not the symbolic Patricia of Separating Fighting Swans nor is it the thwarted intimacy or prurience of the nudes. This is an informal Patricia, almost unaware of our gaze on her as she sits in the sun and scratches her arm. Kenneth Pople draws a very interesting comparison with a photograph of Patricia taken by Spencer on their trip to Switzerland in the same year where we see her seated in a spring meadow of flowers, and the consistency with the present image is striking (fig.1).

However, there is something more here. The landscape of Cockmarsh Hill behind her is by no means the picture-postcard depiction of a beloved place one might expect, but a backdrop of rough grass and bushes. Yet the delicacy of the painting is a full demonstration of an understanding of place that had he never painted a figure in his life would alone have made Spencer a landscape painter of high standing. The straggly new growth of the bushes, the dry and dusty channel of earth, not quite a pathway but we know we'd probably walk up it as we climbed the hill, the haze of long grasses towards the brow and the warm afternoon light which suffuses the whole scene, all these make our understanding of the qualities and atmosphere of this apparently unremarkable location as real as if we were there. In the foreground we see Patricia's head and shoulders in profile, her neck bare save for the jewelled necklace she wears. The purplish red of the amethysts mirrors the flowers in the field behind here, and her hair, worn loose, seems to be about to meld with the grasses around her. She is indubitably part of the scene, part of the place, she is to Stanley become a part of Cookham itself. This is a lover's painting, one which sees in the subject something to be worshipped and adored.

Indeed there is one further element that seals such a reading of this painting. At the time Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill was painted, Stanley and Hilda were leading essentially separate lives but were still married and Hilda was yet to agree to a divorce. Patricia was of course still living at Moor Thatch, the cottage she shared with her companion Dorothy, but it was around this time when Stanley was considering making over his own house, Lindworth, to Patricia. In Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill, Stanley shows Patricia wearing what are clearly two rings on the third finger of her left hand, which one can only assume represent engagement and wedding rings. As such, there is a clear message here that Stanley is already seeing Patricia both as his own wife in some form, but that she is also wedded into the spirit of place that Cookham represents for Stanley and is such a significant part of himself.

This remarkable painting therefore might be considered something of an illumination to our now familiar and well-worn version of the Stanley-Hilda-Patricia tangle. This is not a vision of the calculating bitch that it is easy to feel hovers in the background behind the story of the difficult but enduring love between Stanley and Hilda. This painting shows us how dangerous hindsight and subsequent retellings of a story can be, how they can obscure something simple. Here, in a field on the outskirts of a small country town, a painter has placed an image of a woman who at this point he will leave his wife and children for. We have the benefit of knowing how subsequent events played out, but in the moment of its creation no-one could know this and thus we must fall back and only see what Stanley is showing us, his vision of a place and person that are entwined in his mind as a symbol of something special.