The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf
All my drawings are self-portraits, and no amount of ‘abstract’ or what-not will conceal from that.
Stanley Spencer1
AT THE SLADE, which Stanley attended from 1908 to 1912, his talents were quickly recognized. In 1909 he was awarded an endowed scholarship and became financially, if modestly, independent. ‘Our genius’ became the epithet half enviously, half affectionately given to the young Stanley by his fellow-students. It did not prevent some of them from ragging or playing practical jokes on him, which he tolerated good-humouredly, except when directed at his art and its integrity. His dedicated nature had little patience with the public-school-type humour prevalent among some of the well-heeled young bloods there. Goaded on one occasion beyond endurance, he silenced one tormentor by pouring white paint over his new suit.*
It was the custom for the students, girls included, to be known only by their surnames. Stanley became not Spencer, but ‘Cookham’. Among the star students of his years – Allinson, Gertler, Nevinson, Currie, Brett, Raverat, Japp, Carrington, Wadsworth, Roberts, Bömberg and Rosenberg – was Gwen Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and reared in the academic atmosphere of Cambridge. Six years older than Stanley in age but perhaps a lifetime older in practical experience, Gwen took the young genius under her wing. He needed sympathetic guidance, a spiritual handholder.
The Slade students then were in the forefront of the Edwardian counterblast to Victorian materialism and sentimentality. It was an exciting age in which to be young. In contact at the Slade with lively young minds inevitably fascinated by the new modernism, Stanley encountered moments when his cautious and deliberate absorption of experience was misunderstood. His celebrated reply when asked at the Slade what he thought of Picasso – that he, Stanley, had ‘not got beyond Piero della Francesca’ – was considered supercilious. But Stanley did not mean to be patronizing. His mind was an instrument which sought connection, and the operation required time. Although he understood the aims of modernism and indeed shared its essential techniques, the fragmentation of its venturing repelled his instinct for totality. Starting from Pa’s advocacy of Ruskin and Tonks’ enthusiasm for early Renaissance painting, Stanley found in medieval art a serenity which matched his aspirations. Artists then, he argued, were integrated members of a stable culture. They were workmen – stone carvers in the Gothic north, mosaicists and fresco painters in the classical south – whose everyday talents were devoted to the beautifying of the churches, chapels, abbeys and great cathedrals which across Western Europe dedicated political power and economic wealth to the glory of the God who had accomplished them. Ruskin, in his opulent prose, set one such painter in his time:
Giotto, like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling decorator of walls, at so much a day, having at Florence a bottega or workshop for the production of small tempera pictures. There were no such things as ‘studios’ in those days. An artist’s ‘studies’ were over by the time he was eighteen; after that he was a lavatore, a ‘labourer’, a man who knew the business and produced certain works of known value for a known price, being troubled with no philosophical abstractions, shutting himself in no wise for the reception of inspiration; receiving indeed a good many as a matter of course, just as he received the sunbeams that came in at his window, the light which he worked by; – in either case without mouthing about it, or merely concerning himself as to the nature of it.
How exactly the sentiments matched Stanley’s! First written in the 1850s, they were published in reprint by George Allen in 1900 as Giotto and his Works at Padua. Gwen lent Stanley a copy. The glory of the subject was to remain evergreen throughout his life. The apprentice Stanley had no problem with his sunbeams; what he needed was the technique to manifest them. Although Stanley absorbed the excitements of the times, he rebuffed attempts at the Slade to recruit him to partisanship. The function of the place was simply to teach him to draw.
Academically, the Slade emphasized precision in line, a feature which reflected the forceful personality of Tonks. A surgeon by profession, he had long been fascinated by art and was delighted to be enticed into teaching by his friend Ernest Brown, the Slade Professor. A tingling of apprehension would herald his visits to the students working in the lofty hall of the men’s Life Class. The college organized a sketch club which held periodic competitions on set subjects, usually biblical. The entries, submitted anonymously, were judged by Tonks, and the prizes were welcome, especially to the poorer scholarship students. Unfortunately Stanley seldom won,* not because his draughtsmanship was inferior but because his compositions were judged not to illustrate the set theme effectively. Herein lies the first indication of a misunderstanding of the intention of Stanley’s art which was to dog him all his life, and which indeed persists in some respects to this day.
Most of Stanley’s early drawings – he had not yet seriously ventured into painting – are entries for these competitions. However, The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf was drawn at the request of a Miss White of Bourne End to illustrate a fairy story she had written.4 She must have been surprised at the result. Stanley’s fairy is no elfin figure, but a substantial young lady impossibly posed on two waterlily leaves which in real life would instantly have sunk under her weight. But of course this is not real life, so Stanley portrays the prince who woos her as a Renaissance figure. He was copied from one of Stanley’s Slade life-class studies of a male model there called Edmunds.
The fairy too was drawn from life. Her name was Dorothy Wooster (Worster). She and her sister Emily were cousins and had been school pupils with Stanley and Gilbert. But the significant fact about Dorothy was that Stanley was boyishly attracted to her, as was Gilbert to Emily, despite their father, the local butcher, being parentally suspicious of the young Spencers’ interest in his daughters.
Stanley’s patron had evidently asked for a drawing showing the love of a prince for a fairy. His method of imagining it was to assemble from his own experience images with which he could reproduce the emotion of that theme. The prince was in love with his fairy; he, Stanley, was in love with Dot. So he simply draws her in the situation, buoyant and beautiful because she is loved. The fact that she would sink like a stone was irrelevant: to Stanley the reality of the imagery is subservient to its emotion. However, Stanley admits that the fairy would be small, so he diminishes her by extending the wheat-stalks on the left. There would be water, so what better location than one eventful in his boyhood memory, a little sandy beach by the bank of the Thames where, Florence tells us, all the Spencer children loved to play when young. Simple, one might say, almost ‘primitive’.
But there is in the drawing a curious detail. In the top left, three flowers or marsh plants are reflected as though on the surface of a pond. In many future paintings we shall find similar detail inserted apparently randomly. Yet its presence can change the entire emphasis of the work. In this case, it suggests that Stanley has turned the smooth surface of the pond from the horizontal to the vertical, so that it becomes a reflecting plate-glass window. The world beyond it is enchanted, its apprehension as intangible as the world Stanley entered when he heard fine music played; the flower reflections have taken the form of musical crochets. The fairy is an emanation from that world, but when the magic ends must return to it. The prince, being of the ‘real’ world, cannot enter that land. Stanley ruefully confesses in his letters that he never had great success with the village girls – ‘buds’ to him – and his anticipation at walking and talking with them was invariably disappointed when they failed to match his soaring expectations. Still, he was asked for a drawing of love, and so his love for Dot, which is the love of the prince for the fairy, which is the theme of love in the drawing, becomes a transcendence of the physical into that magic state Stanley cannot yet attain but which he knows to be the spiritual, ‘heaven’.
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