From a place in Cookham he would personify his feelings, embody them in visual manifestation: ‘I wanted to see the beings that certain places would of their own spiritual essence bring forth. … I wanted the persons in the picture to continue without interruption what the place had begun in my mind and for them to be the material outcome of the place.’8 The place he chose was ‘a place on Odney Common where looking towards a grassy bank towards Mill Lane I had the feeling for that picture’. The spot had no orchard, so it ‘was not in my picture at all; it was the place I thought about because it seemed to bring the thought of this picture in my mind. It helped me to the frame of mind to produce this idea.’
Stanley simply transferred the place-feeling, as he had done with the river bank and Widbrook Common in John Donne Arriving in Heaven, to a known orchard, in this case one which grew in a garden beyond Fernlea, and painted that. Such transferences of associated feelings characterize all Stanley’s work. Again it is the emotion which he wished to universalize: ‘It is significant to me that in my early religious pictures done at a time when I was innocent I wanted to include in the concept the idea of men and women. I think the Apple Gatherers does say something of the fact of men and women, something that does go past and beyond the usual conceptions to whatever the relationship is.’9
The figures in the painting are not merely expressing a discovery of erotic awareness. They are expressing Stanley’s nascent comprehension that the purpose of the representation of males and females in his painting would be to come together in ‘fusion’, and thereby to celebrate the unity which was beginning to mean for Stanley an unfolding of the ‘identity’ of God. Why God should appear in disparate form as male and female was to Stanley a mystery. He could not accept that any division was connected with concepts of guilt or sin or punishment or banishment or the wrath of God.* To Stanley the miracle was that our instincts impel us to attempt a reconstitution of the original and ultimate unity, the Alpha and Omega. No wonder the figures in his painting are hesitant! They are being born of Creation. They see God.
In a letter of the time to his fellow-student Jacques Raverat, Stanley told him that Apple Gatherers was as significant in his thinking as Jacques’ own painting The Dancers was in his. Jacques Raverat, six years older than Stanley, was the son of a French businessman at Le Havre who combined intellectualism with a worthy propensity for making money. The latter gained him an elegant estate in Burgundy, the Château de Vienne at Prunoy; the former persuaded him to send Jacques for a liberal English education at the progressive Bedales School near Petersfield. First at the Sorbonne and then at Cambridge Jacques read mathematics, became a stalwart of the Rupert Brooke circle, and met Gwen Darwin. Gwen’s interest in art led her determinedly to the Slade in 1908 in the same student intake, as we have seen, as Stanley. A recurring illness first manifest in 1907 persuaded Jacques that his true interest also lay in art, and in the spring of 1910 he too joined the Slade. While there he and Gwen married in June 1911. Perhaps Stanley had been a little adoring of Jacques’ bride:
C-o-n-g-r-a-t-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s! As soon as you have more babies than you want, you might give me one. Must have a wife before you can have a baby. Rotten, I call it. I used to have to eat my bread and butter before I could have my cake. Same thing. I don’t think there is any just cause or impediment why you two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, but you might have let me know earlier. My God, if I’d heard the banns …!10
Honeymooning in France, they sent him a ‘having-a-marvellous-time-hope-to-see-you-soon’ postcard.*11
Unlike the free wild creatures of Jacques’ The Dancers, leaping Matisse-like on some ethereal shore, the figures of Stanley’s painting are contemplative, tremulous. Like Stanley himself, the figures stand on the threshold of a wild discovery and are amazed.* When the painting was later exhibited, Stanley was disconcerted to find its theme interpreted as a portrayal of sexual attraction. But to him this was neither its prime intent nor an aspect he wished emphasized. He wanted to ‘go past and beyond usual conceptions’. Why then, his critics argued, show the sexes separate? Again Stanley was baffled. He could ‘not account for the fact that I have divided the sexes in the picture.’ Of course he could not. If he showed them separate, that was because they were posed in the only way he could as yet manage; for in the sublimity to which he aspired he had as yet no experience of the sexual ‘fusion’ whose meaning he was struggling to understand. If his admirers could not grasp from his painting what he was trying to say, then there was little he could do to help them: ‘I feel rather like the young man who when he thinks his girl is admiring his thoughts and ideas and feelings finds that it is the way his hair curls which is the real attraction.’14
But to those like the Raverats who genuinely understood, Stanley’s joy in his painting was incontestable:
The picture was the first ambitious work, and I have in it wished to say what life was. … I felt a need for my religious experience expressed in earlier paintings to include all that was a happy experience for me. One can’t, I know, make endearing remarks to a canvas before you begin to paint on it, but I felt I could kiss the canvas all over just as I began to paint my apple picture on it.15
Study me then you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring,
For I am every dead thing
In whom Love wrought new Alchemy.
John Donne: Poems1
ONCE POSSESSED of an overpowering idea, Stanley would all his life tenaciously worry its development through a succession of paintings. The desperate desire to resolve the paradox of duality became spiritual in Apple Gatherers. In The Nativity, also painted in 1912, the longing became religious.
If from the title we expect a conventional interpretation, we shall be surprised. Stanley is a will-o’-the-wisp who leads us unsuspectingly into what we think is familiar territory only, Puck-like, magically to change our surroundings, so that we stand bewildered, disturbed, abandoned, even resentful, according to our preconceptions.
What is it in his painting which so suddenly changes terrain we thought we knew? It is his composition, the transformation of content into visual presentation, which disorientates us, so that only slowly and perhaps incredulously do we begin to find our bearings. Many, in Stanley’s day, never found them, and simply relished the surprise. The message, to his chagrin, was all too often dismissed or devalued.
In his Nativity, the three Wise Men have come to visit. They are presented thus in a preliminary drawing. But now two of the Magi have become, surprisingly, the males of two pairs of lovers who meet as the emotional focus of the composition. The third remains a kneeling worshipper. The lovers are absorbed in each other and are oblivious to the presence of the Holy Family. This is not unexpected in view of the fact that Stanley intended the Holy Family to be not a tangible presence in Mill Lane, but visual imagery to convey his awed