To coincide with the exhibition currently on show at the Stanley Spencer Gallery.
The Cookham Brotherhood, The Art of Gilbert and Stanley Spencer, (until 3rd November 2024)
LL are delighted to present a selling exhibition:
Gilbert and Stanley: Affinities
Born one year apart and brought up in Cookham, in Berkshire, Stanley and Gilbert both attended the Slade, and both were recognised as star pupils .
Affinities was how the art critic Eric Newton described the brothers. They fought for the affections of the artist Hilda Carline (1889-1950), the personable Gilbert ultimately losing out to the loquacious otherworldliness of his brother, who married her in 1925 – although Gilbert did accompany them on honeymoon.
According to the critic Terence Mullaly, “it has also been entirely overlooked that Stanley Spencer owed a considerable debt to his brother.” The Telegraph, Oct 1972
In The Oxford Dictionary of English Art Denis Farr asserted that Stanley “stoutly maintained in later life that his younger brother, Gilbert, was the much more accomplished landscape painter”.
Writing to Gilbert, Stanley later recalled ‘Cookham was for you as it was for me. We both had identical sympathies and a different sort of approach.’