The Collections supported by Leeds Art Fund

One of the first in a series of large religious paintings by Spencer bought by the Leeds Art Collections Fund in 1941.

The scene is set in the High Street at Cookham, Spencer’s home village to which he had returned following war service with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Although the setting of a religious scene in a contemporary context may seem unconventional, it does in fact have a tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages.

This is one of a series of large scale religious paintings which Spencer began in 1920, the same year in which he was invited to submit designs for murals for Leeds Town Hall, a project which never came to fruition.

Spencer’s is the personal vision of an artist whose beliefs were unorthodox and often disconcerting.

An artist perhaps best known for his biblical scenes, set in the village where he lived and worked for most of his life. An English artist, Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham, Berkshire. His father was a music teacher and Stanley was the eighth child in a family where religion, music and literature were of the greatest importance. Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art from 1908-12 and won prizes. His work was exhibited at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. At the beginning of the First World War, Spencer enlisted, serving first in the Royal Army Medical Corps at a hospital in Bristol and later in Macedonia. His experiences of wartime service were movingly expressed in his art ten years afterwards when he painted murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, commissioned by the parents of a soldier who, like Spencer, had served in Macedonia. During the Second World War , Spencer again served as an official war artist, this time in Glasgow, where he painted large canvases showing the work of shipbuilders on the Clyde. Stanley Spencer was created a CBE in 1950 and was knighted a few months before his death in 1959. Religion played an important part in Spencer’s life, as did the village of Cookham, where he was born and lived for many years. He is said to have thought of Cookham as ‘a village in heaven’. Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem is shown taking place in a street in Cookham. The painting was bought by the LACF in 1941. The Leeds Art Fund has also bought three other works by Stanley Spencer: Madonna Lilies, Cookham, oil on panel, (bought 1936); Gardens in the Pound, Cookham, oil on canvas (bought 1940) and Study for Leeds Decoration, watercolour (bought 1973).