“I, as you know, always have my little prayer mat in my hand ready to prostrate myself before everything I have seen of yours” – Stanley Spencer on Gilbert, Gilbert Spencer’s Memoirs, p. 138

To coincide with our Gilbert Spencer exhibition at Abbot Hall, Kendal, Liss Llewellyn is delighted to present a special online campaign dedicated to the artist’s works on paper. Spencer was a consummate draughtsman. He cut his teeth at the Slade School in the 1910’s, honing his craft under the punishing demands of Sir Henry Tonks who instilled in Spencer the belief that ‘to do a bad drawing was like living with a lie’. But Gilbert was a decorated student, and works in this exhibition attest to the various prizes he won during his study, not least in the feted Summer Competition Prize, where he was awarded joint first prize in 1914 for a large, Florentine-inspired view of Marsh Meadows in Cookham, entitled Summer (now in the collection of the UCL Art Museum). An important preparatory study for this painting is featured as part of this show.

War interrupted his studies, and Spencer was drafted to the Macedonian front, serving in Salonika, the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, where he became an Official War Artist. This exhibition includes works from his time in Sinai – a preliminary sketch of a ward sister for his WWI masterpiece, New Arrivals – as well as a group of large, witty watercolours from his service as a subsection leader with the Grasmere Home Guard. Furthermore, the exhibition contains works from Spencer’s time as a department head at the Glasgow School of Art, and studies for the artist’s most celebrated postwar work, Hebridean Memory, which was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951.