Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Stanley Spencer : Journey to Burghclere, Hardback Book

Stanley Spencer : Journey to Burghclere Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Stanley Spencer was one of Britain's greatest twentieth-century artists.

He became famous for two things: his celebration and immortalisation of his home town of Cookham in Berkshire - his 'heaven on earth' as he lovingly called it - and the fusion in his paintings of sex and religion, the heavenly and the ordinary.

In 1915, Spencer left home to serve as a medical orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol.

Aged 24, he had rarely stayed away overnight from home.

For ten months, he scrubbed floors, bandaged convalescent soldiers and carried supplies around the vast, former lunatic asylum.

In 1916, he signed up for overseas duty in Macedonia, where he saw violent action up to the eve of the Armistice.

Five years after the war, Spencer started making large drawings of a possible memorial scheme based on his wartime experiences.

So extraordinary were his sketches, and so committed was he to realising them in paint, that the Behrend family became his patrons, funding a purpose-built memorial chapel at Burghclere, near Newbury. For five years, he toiled, often on top of a giant scaffold, to produce the painted chapel now regarded as his masterpiece - one of the unsung artistic glories of Europe.

Drawing on Spencer's own letters, illustrations and paintings, Paul Gough 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 unique vision of peace and resurrection in Burghclere.

The book locates Spencer's work alongside other soldier-artists of the time.

Information

Other Formats

Save 17%

£35.00

£28.75

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information