Stanley Spencer, Somerset House

Eighteen First World War paintings by renowned 20th century war artist Stanley Spencer have made their way to Somerset House from their home, the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire, to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One. 

Painted from memory over the course of six years and finally finished in 1931, these two metre high canvases depict scenes from Spencer’s harrowing experiences as a hospital orderly in Bristol in 1915 and with the Royal Army Medical Corps on the forgotten Macedonian Salonika Front. They have been described as ‘some of the greatest of all war memorials’.

Spencer was deeply religious and profoundly devoted to his bucolic English roots. His pre-war work centred on his rural hometown idyll of Cookham (Berkshire), and saw him cast Biblical parables against its rolling hills, peopling them with its residents. Despite the darker tone of his post-war work, irrevocably scarred by the horrors of service as he was, the Sandham canvases speak of an artist still seeking to pick out the miraculous from among the unglamorous and the everyday. 

Painted specifically for the chapel (built for him by his patrons and flagfliers-in-chief John Louis and Mary Behrend), the paintings draw out beauty in the banalities of soldierly life. Ablutions, a tableaux of soldiers washing their faces, dressing, and having iodine painted onto wounds raises bathing to high art, whilst the wonky geometry of Kit Inspection shines a warm light onto the communality of life at the Front. While at first seeming to portray a company sprawled on sunlit ground in death, Map-Reading is on closer inspection a rendering of a mid-hike nap. For Spencer, these quiet moments of symbolism and poetry amid overarching chaos represented ‘heaven in a hell of war’.

This exhibition - the National Trust’s first major London show in 18 years - features Spencer’s preparatory sketches as well as works by his contemporary Henry Lamb.

Admission: Free

Address and map: Strand, London WC2R 1LA ‎

Nearest tube: Temple