The main summer exhibition this year focused on the paintings and drawings of one of the most extraordinary and best-loved British artists of the twentieth century. Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) is well known for his mysterious and visionary images of biblical scenes, intensely observed landscape paintings and brutally realistic and intimate portraits of the people he knew and loved.

Spencer's paintings are very personal and his imagery is strange and fantastic, combining the real and the imaginary. Throughout his life he developed a unique vision, which explored his inner feelings towards religion and sexuality centred on his own life and relationships.

The exhibition included a carefully selected group of paintings and drawings, which demonstrated Spencer's unique vision and his ideas. This exhibition was organised in collaboration with Tate as part of the Tate Partnership Scheme

Full catalogue for this exclusive exhibition at Abbot Hall detailing 26 works in the show.
Includes:
In depth background information to each painting.
68 pages
26 colour reproductions
ISBN: 1-902498-09-7

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.