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The Resurrection at Cookham
(painting, 1926)
The Resurrection at Cookham imagines the Day of Judgment occurring not in a biblical Middle Eastern setting but in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, a small Methodist chapel in the small English village of Cookham. It is not surprising that Stanley Spencer decided to situate his depiction of the great resurrection of the dead in this humble churchyard, for it was in Cookham that he had first experienced a revelation of the interconnectedness of the physical and the spiritual. Spencer once wrote of the sudden awakening that came over him one day when he perceived that even the most mundane and ordinary objects reflected a divine radiance:
Quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning, and this made everything holy. The instinct of Moses to take his shoes off when he saw the burning bush was very similar to my feelings. I saw many burning bushes in Cookham. I observed the sacred quality in the most unexpected quarters.1
The Resurrection at Cookham is a large painting—nine feet high and eighteen feet wide—and it is peopled not only with the Father and the Son but also with friends and family, the people he knew and loved. His first wife, Hilda, is the model for no less than three different figures. Numerous other friends also served as models. There is a flurry of activity as the dead rise out of their graves, but the tone of the picture remains serene. Some lounge about on top of the caskets they have just exited, some struggle out of their coffins or lift up the flowering sod to exit their earthen graves, and some intently study the writing on the tombstones in the churchyard. A group of “prophets”—Moses among them—stands along the wall of the church, rapt in thought, and Spencer painted himself in the bottom right corner, lying on two slabs of a broken tomb as though he is reclining in the pages of a great stone book. “Nobody is in a hurry in this painting,” said Spencer of this work. “Those men lying on top of the tombs I like very much, they gave me the feeling that the Resurrection is a peaceful occasion, and very positive. I like the happiness, that’s the main idea of the picture.”2 This is not a somber “Last Judgment” picture where the good and bad are being separated but an optimistic celebration of everlasting life. Christ sits under the church porch, surrounded by overhanging roses, holding three babies in his arms. The Father stands behind him, affectionately tousling his hair.
The Resurrection at Cookham by Stanley Spencer, Tate Gallery, London [© Tate Images/Art Resource, New York]
The local churchyard has become a new Garden of Eden, echoing the images of Renaissance painters who imagined heaven as the Garden reborn. There are flowers in great abundance, painted with exacting detail and vivid colors. Heaven has come down to Cookham as the bodies rise up, and in a sense Cookham itself has become what Spencer called “a holy suburb of heaven.”3
Stanley Spencer was born in 1891 in Cookham, England, where he lived most of his life, and which held a tender place of importance in his memory as well as in his understanding of the world. He grew up in a family who took their faith seriously and whose daily routine included Bible readings by his father. As an adult, he fused his love of the Bible with the simple pleasure he took in ordinary things to create a unique artistic vision. He sought “the rich religious significance of the place I live in,”4 and his paintings became his primary way of expressing his sense of the holy ordinary.
A string of early masterworks follow the same format as The Resurrection at Cookham—canvases crowded with figures that reenvision stories from the life of Christ as though they took place in his beloved English hometown. Nativity (1912) imagines the birth of Christ taking place in a Cookham garden. In Christ Carrying the Cross (1920), we are witnesses to a solemn procession toward the crucifixion as it moves through the winding lanes of Cookham. Onlookers peer down from their windows above, and the blowing lace curtains appear almost like angel’s wings. An ordinary fence-lined street in Cookham becomes the setting for Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem (1921), and in The Betrayal (1922–23), Judas’s treachery has been relocated to a dark back alley of Spencer’s hometown. This relocation of these events invests a sacredness into the environs of his beloved village, and adds a homey familiarity to the biblical stories.
Spencer’s most characteristic paintings look as though a pre-Renaissance master such as Giotto or Fra Angelico had consorted with the Cubists. These canvases are usually overcrowded, with lots of action, almost as if the figures can barely be contained within the picture frame; there is little attention given to creating a sense of depth in the paintings, with everything occurring on a pretty shallow and singular plane; and the figures are almost always somewhat distorted. In keeping with his belief that the sacred is best glimpsed through the ordinary, Spencer also embraced the ugliness and ungainliness of the world, using his brush to transfigure objects and illuminate their unnoticed inner beauties. He sought to capture the cozy and homey aspects of normal life and elevate them to a state where they become revelatory about the deepest things.
Spencer always felt a close emotional connection between sexuality and spirituality. He married Hilda Carline in 1925, but over time their differences led to a cooling of affections. In the early 1930s Spencer became obsessed with a woman named Patricia Preese, to whom he was sexually attracted. She was the subject of several scandalous nudes he painted, often including himself in the pictures. They were honest and unflattering, sagging with all the heaviness of flesh. In them Patricia often has a faraway and uninterested look in her eyes, but that did not keep her from becoming his second wife when Hilda refused to accept the situation of Spencer trying to maintain two love affairs. From what we know it seems unlikely that this second marriage was ever consummated, as Patricia returned to her lesbian lover soon after managing to get ownership of the Spencer home transferred to her name. Spencer was devastated.
In 1939, at the height of his personal problems and a low point in his popularity as an artist, Spencer retreated into a period of relative seclusion. During this time, when he felt like he was undergoing a wilderness experience himself, he turned his efforts to a series of paintings he called Christ in the Wilderness. Originally envisioned as forty separate paintings representing the forty days that Christ was tempted in the wilderness, only eight were finished. The period during which he created them was a period of great spiritual renewal for him, a chance to contemplate his own mistakes and the temptations to which he had succumbed. Despite the emotional pain he was experiencing, he found some peace in this time. “I felt there was something wonderful in the life I was living. I loved it all because it was God and me all the time.”5
The resulting paintings are unlike most of his other work: straightforward, uncluttered compositions that put Jesus at the center of each canvas. Since the Bible only records what happened on the final day of Jesus’s wilderness experience, Spencer has imagined the life he might have lived during the other thirty-nine days. In one, he rises from sleep and kneels with his arms stretched upward, offering himself to the Father. In another, he gazes fixedly on a dangerous scorpion that crawls about in the palm of his hand. In Consider the Lilies, we see him crouching upon his hands and knees, face down among the flowers, and seeming to drink in the pleasure of their loveliness. Another in the series has him resting on his side, tenderly watching over a mother hen and her chicks, his body curled protectively around them. Each of these paintings has a Scripture verse attached to it, and Spencer seems to be playfully suggesting that some of the images and illustrations Jesus used in his parables and teachings might have arisen from experiences he had while alone in the desert. As Spencer worked in solitude on these paintings, they were a reflection of the effort he was making to reconstruct his own life.
Toward the very end of his life, Spencer again focused on the biblical themes that had energized his earlier paintings. In a picture filled with much celebration and jollity, Spencer reimagines the passage in Mark 4, where Jesus is preaching to the swelling crowds from a boat, as an event that is taking place at the local boat races (Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, 1959). For his last major work, Spencer was commissioned to paint a crucifixion for the chapel of a school, but it stirred up controversy because the disturbing violence of the act was being perpetrated by men wearing the distinctive caps of the very brewers’ organization who had funded the piece. In this final painting we do not witness the peace and celebration of the resurrection, but the horror of the cross, and the wild, evil glint in the eyes of Christ’s persecutors. As Spencer tried to explain to his offended patrons, “you are still nailing Christ to the cross.”6
Throughout the course of his artistic life, Stanley Spencer used ordinary places as the backdrop for extraordinary events—as the “doorstep” upon which is revealed the spiritual significance that can be glimpsed in everyday life. He saw his work of painting as an act of redemption, of recapturing the significance of all things. His life-affirming paintings seem to tell us that the sacred events of the Bible are not just in the past, but are still taking place in ordinary little villages like Cookham, or in yours or mine.