SKU: 11367
Gilbert Spencer
(1892 - 1979)
The Farmer with his herd
£2,850
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Gilbert Spencer (1892 - 1979)
Size:
Height – 51cm
Width – 60cm
Although it had latterly become known as Cookham Barns, this painting has been reidentified as Barn at Wootton, exhibited at the Goupil Gallery Salon in 1925 (48). It is likely to refer to Wootton near Abingdon, an area Spencer painted frequently in the mid 1920s, rather than the Wootton near Woodstock, though both are in Oxfordshire.
I was always dubious about the identification of this painting as ‘Cookham Barns’, as the agricultural architecture is not typical of Cookham, Gilbert was not painting in Cookham in 1925, and there are no known works corresponding to it. The date of 1925 means that it can be almost certainly identified as ‘Barn at Wootton’, the only painting of a barn exhibited around that time.
Gilbert Spencer was a committed landscape painter, adding his unique voice to the great tradition of English pastoral painting. The Secretary of the Royal Academy, Sidney Hutchinson, remarked that Spencer ‘might well be called the John Constable of theTwentieth Century.’
We are grateful to Paul Gough and Amy Lim for providing this information through their online catalogue.
Painter, especially of landscapes, draughtsman, teacher and writer, and brother of the painter Stanley Spencer. Born at Cookham, Berkshire. Spencer studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, woodcarving at the Royal College of Art, 1911-12, then with Fred Brown and Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1913-20. Between 1915 and 1919 he served in the army. Spencer had his first one-man show at the Goupil Gallery in 1923; he also exhibited at the RA (he was elected RA in 1960), NEAC, (of which he was a member), Leicester Galleries, RSA, Redfern Gallery and many other venues. Although he produced notable wall paintings for Holywell Manor, Oxford, 1934-6, Spencer made his name as a landscape artist working mainly in the English southern counties. At various times he taught at the Royal College of Art, Glasgow School of Art and Camberwell, serving meanwhile as an Official War Artist, 1940-3. His book Stanley Spencer appeared in 1961 and his autobiography, Memoirs of a Painter, in 1974. A retrospective exhibition was held at Reading in 1964. The Tate and many other public collections hold his work. He sometimes just signed his work GS. He lived in Hampstead and towards the end of his life near Reading, Berkshire.
