Sir Stanley Spencer, R.A.

Arthur Tooth & Sons, London

Sir A. Hornby

Michael C. Stewart, Esq.

Stanley and Audrey Burton, by whom gifted to the previous owner circa 2000 and thence by descent

Worthing, Worthing Art Gallery, Sir Stanley Spencer, R.A., 9 September - 7 October 1961, no. 24

Cookham, The Cookham Festival, Stanley Spencer and his family – portraits and studies, 1977, no. 14, catalogue by Carolyn Leder

Spencer was aged 51 on 12 August 1942, when he drew this Self-Portrait. He was then an Official War Artist, working on his Shipbuilding on the Clyde series (Imperial War Museum). In 1942 he was based in Cookham but paid periodic visits to Port Glasgow. On one such visit, in 1943, Spencer worked ‘oblivious of noise, war, onlookers and cameraman’ as Cecil Beaton photographed him in Lithgow’s yard, Port Glasgow. These photographs are reproduced in Kenneth Pople’s biography of Spencer.¹

The artist drew and painted a notable series of self-portraits throughout his career. Spencer appeared in a family photograph only a month before he made this drawing, when he and his former wife Hilda visited their daughters, pupils at Badminton School, which had been evacuated to Lynmouth. ²

Carolyn Leder

1.Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer, A Biography, Collins, 1991, reproduced p420.

2.Ibid, p435