Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk
Amy Lim, curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot House and volunteer curator at the Stanley Spencer Museum, talked us through the latter’s exhibition in collaboration with Gainsborough House, looking at Stanely Spencer and Suffolk.
Lim explained how Stanley met his wife, the artist Hilda Carline, who had worked as a land girl in Suffolk in the First World War and how they returned to the county for their honeymoon and on working holidays painting. She talked us through paintings made on those trips.
She then talked about the breakup of the marriage and Stanley’s second marriage to Patricia Preece and how, when that rapidly broke up too, he returned to Suffolk to work and to see if it still meant the same thing to him.
She talked about how Stanley was rooted in a sense of space and how this also showed in his work based on his village Cookham. She also talked about his later work based on his first marriage but, I’ll be honest, I didn’t see how that related to Suffolk.
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