Resurrection

 

Detail of 'Resurrection, Cookham' (1924-27)

Sir Stanley Spencer, held at Tate Britain, London.

 

Reflections for Easter Day, the 20^th of April 2025, in the pew notes at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey.

 

Today Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) is one of England’s most celebrated artists. Like so many English people, Spencer lived virtually his entire life in one place, in his case the village of Cookham, upstream from London. He described the place as “possessed by a sacred presence.” Here he used his inimitable artistic gifts to depict Cookham through an understanding of his favourite reading: the Bible in the Authorised Version. ‘Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta’ is one of his masterpieces. Another, ‘Resurrection, Cookham’, was acquired by Tate Britain in 1927. He turned the Victorian ‘conversation piece’ painting into a visionary and very personal revelation of Scripture, his lived environment, and those he knew in everyday life.

 The Resurrection recurs as a preferred subject throughout his life. The Resurrection is happening where you find yourself. In the Tate painting, the villagers rest or rise or stand in the church graveyard, dressed and in appearance as they were in the day, in the artist’s own memory, some of them standing literally in their graves. Surprise, bafflement, wonder, amazement, disbelief are responses to the vast image, but then what is the right response to seeing resurrection? The artist appears to be saying, this is what you do feel at such times. One observer has said Spencer had little sense of hierarchy: everything is a creation of God. Another recalled him saying some gallery visitors “become angry because his ‘Resurrection’s don’t look like their ideas about the Resurrection.”  Which rather begs the question of what does it look like? His painting, for all its unusual manner, creates an immense sense of peace. Although viewers recognize many of the traumas and challenges of Spencer’s own life writ large in the people portrayed, here in the churchyard there is a powerful sense of reconciliation and belonging. It is a painting that invites prolonged contemplation, even over a lifetime.

 Related to this exemplary Christian action in art, Stanley Spencer was also a kind of self-appointed lay preacher. Biographers tell countless stories of Spencer talking at length to anyone about Bible passages, at any time of the day or night. Understanding residents of Cookham are recorded as having every reaction to his extended exegeses, the underwhelming, whelming, and overwhelming. It was a great day to be alive. Blessedly, we can all take time today to be whelmed by his sermons on canvas and paper, prolific, inspiring, and original as they are. Spencer puts us in the way of seeing our own world in all of its immediacy, drama, and uniqueness.