Stanley presented his painting at the Slade for comment. It did not please Tonks, but it came to the attention of Clive Bell, who was setting up with Roger Fry the second of the two seminal post-impressionist exhibitions of those years in London. The first, in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries, had burst like a bombshell on a largely insular British public, creating a furore and dividing the art establishment into the reactionary and the progressive. Bell selected Stanley’s painting for inclusion in the 1912 exhibition also at the Grafton Galleries where in the English section it was hung with works by Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Henry Lamb and Roger Fry to match the corresponding works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky in the Octagon. Critics, viewing it, suggested that it indicated Stanley’s endorsement of post-impressionism. Some pronounced that he had not got it quite right.8
Once again Stanley was flummoxed. Others were defining his work by standards which had no meaning for him. The classifications of critics or art historians were their invention, not his. Stanley could be representative in so far as he took imagery from the real world; visionary in so far as he arranged it on the canvas in unexpected, often subconscious, juxtapositions; expressionist in so far as his aim was to convey personal emotion; symbolist in so far as he cast certain experiences in images which he will repeat as visual shorthand, and imitative in that he sought a visual style of the representational which, whether by instinct or example, came close in his early works to matching the attributes of impressionism. One such invoked the use of colour to replace the normal light and dark of shadow and sunlight, so that at its most exciting impressionist painting appears shadowless, its detail diffused not by light and shade but by luminous colour. In John Donne Arriving in Heaven Stanley used diffused colour in this way – except that he also inserted a sunlight which is fiercely low and hard, throwing pronounced shadows. Why? No doubt because he needed a device like the reflected flowers of The Fairy on the Waterlily Leaf to point up an emotion in the painting which was of importance to him. The strongest shadow, that of John Donne himself, zigzags to emphasize the verticality of the riverbank. The cliffs could be barriers. John Donne can see heaven beyond them, but he has not yet attained it. He is, writes Stanley, ‘walking alongside Heaven’; as, we may assume, was Stanley himself as he quietly read Donne’s sermons and poetry.*
It is at this point that Stanley departs from post-impressionism. In its perfect forms such painting deliberately avoids kinesis, drama, the sense of the onward march of events. It asks no questions, suggests no answers. It may portray activity, even action, but seldom intent. Each picture is a snapshot of a moment caught with subtlety but without regard for past or future. Respectful though Stanley was of the intensity of its concentration, such stasis could never fully satisfy a young explorer desperate in a sensed world of miracles and mystery to record his moments of discovery and illumination.
John Donne Arriving in Heaven is a totality which celebrates the excitement Stanley feels in journeying towards a concept of joy he knows exists. But in detail he is still a novice struggling through music and literature to master truths which, if they ever come to him on earth, will do so only through time and experience.
All my life I have been impressed with the idea of emergence – a train coming out of a tunnel, for instance.
Stanley Spencer1
OUTSIDE COOKHAM – in London, at the Slade, in Taunton Stanley was the visitor, observing. But within Cookham he was emotionally the lover, absorbing: ‘I liked to take my thoughts for a walk and marry them to some place in Cookham,’2 he was to say years later of his adolescence. When the place in question became sufficiently ‘holy’, Stanley’s ‘marriage’ could be almost literal, as he confessed in 1912 to Gwen Darwin: ‘I never want to leave Cookham. … I have taken some compositions [drawings] to a little place I know’ – it was off Mill Lane – ‘and buried them in the earth there.’3 Gilbert remembered that Stanley had been reading Thomas Browne’s metaphysical Urn Burial. Stanley told Florence that he put his drawings into a tin ‘and while I go up and down to London, I often think of them. This is sentimental, but it does not matter. I shall go on being so. This is all very confidential, mind.’ It had to be so because his Slade fellow-students would have ragged him unmercifully had they known.
Gwen understood. Years later she too was to describe her own childhood feelings for, of all things, the cobbles of her grandfather Charles Darwin’s patio:
To us children everything at Down was perfect. … all the flowers that grew at Down were beautiful; and different from all other flowers. Everything was different. And better.
For instance, the path in front of the verandah was made of large round water-worn pebbles, from some beach. They were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and they were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean, literally adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes.4
At this probationary period in his creativity, Stanley was instinctively circumspect. Perhaps in his day and milieu there was less temptation than today to reject imbibed precepts. In any case, his innate caution would have inhibited rebellion. His mind worked associatively forward from received experience. Thus in disowning the ‘clammy atmosphere’ of his Methodist prayer-meeting he was not dismissing the basic assumptions of orthodox Christianity, but trying to reconcile them with some wider concept he was sensing. Such accretion of new experience to old expanded both. So the encompassing instinct implanted in him – the desire to absorb himself into the being of all around him – must be capable of such transcendence, and such was his approach to Apple Gatherers, painted during the Christmas – New Year vacation of 1911 – 12.5
The title had earlier been set as subject for a Slade Sketch Club competition and Stanley developed the painting from his drawing for the competition.* He began it at Fernlea, but when the house became crowded over Christmas, Gilbert records that he then used the empty Ship Inn, a cottage at the head of Mill Lane, once a tavern. Oddly enough, among the debris there were piles of stored apple trays. Sydney was fascinated to recount Stanley’s progress in his diary:
We had a kick or two with the football in Marsh Meadows and then went to Maidenhead to Miss Heybourne’s where Stan made purchases for his painting, I paying as his Christmas present. (2 January 1912)
Stan got on very well with his painting. The group seems to be more substantial, more at one with itself than it was. He has covered the neck of the lowest figure with a long curl which has redeemed the head to my fancy. (4 January 1912)
Stan is now engaged on the head of the chief woman figure in the painting. (5 January 1912)
Stan is now on the heads of the four men. He takes his own mouth in the mirror as a copy. Stan’s arm for the woman, too. (6 January 1912)
‘Stan’ was still working on it on 21 January, although by then it was nearing completion. Gilbert later asserted that Stanley painted it over a Resurrection he had done, and subsequent tests have substantiated that this must have been so.6
With so many of the Slade competitions being set on biblical themes, one might expect