Stanley Spencer 1891-1959

In March 1940, Stanley Spencer travelled to Glasgow to begin work on a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. For the next five years, he made numerous trips to the city while developing a series of panoramic paintings of shipbuilders working on the Clyde. Despite Spencer’s initial enthusiasm for the project, he was troubled that there was some further, spiritual aspect of the city and its inhabitants he had yet to express. One night when out walking, he found a new source of inspiration. ‘I walked up along the road past the gasworks to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope…I seemed then to see that it rose in the midst of a great plain and that all in the plain were resurrecting and moving towards it…I knew then that the resurrection would be directed from this hill.’ 1
Just as the Holy Trinity Church in Cookham had provided the location for his career-making The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924 – 27, the Port Glasgow cemetery became the setting for a spectacular new body of work on the theme of the resurrection. Spencer’s initial plan for one 40-foot-long painting and five further pictures was scaled back at the request of his dealer Dudley Tooth, eventually becoming nine works, four of them triptychs. He painted the first two, The Resurrection: Reunion and The Resurrection: Waking Up, in Glasgow in 1945, completing the series back in Cookham.
Here we see the dead at the point of waking, stretching and yawning, as if this were an everyday occurrence. In 1950, Spencer explained, ‘In the central panel, there are two mourners on a cast-iron seat (…) I wanted to stress the idea of the seat being somewhere in the cemetery made especially for the living and now used at the resurrection by these visitors, just as they have used it time and again when they came to sit there and think peacefully and hopefully about those lying near them. They are not disturbed by the resurrection but, because of the joy they feel at the peace of it, remain where they are.’ 2
In Waking Up, we find a conflation of the seasons – an elderly gravedigger scoops up autumn leaves while, as the dead rejoin the living, spring-flowering primroses and summer convolvulus burst into life. Spencer has painted every inch of the canvas with an obsessive detail reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, the side panels a tangle of arms and legs, in which the women’s patterned dresses merge with the ground where they were just sleeping.

1 The artist cited in Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer, Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon, Oxford, 1979, p69
2 The artist cited in The Faber Gallery, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945 –1950), Faber and Faber, 1951, p15