The look of love
STANLEY SPENCER’S Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill has been saved for the nation, thanks to the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and Friends of the Stanley Spencer Gallery. Painted in 1935, the work speaks of the artist’s obsession with the sitter, whose diamond and amethyst necklace echoes the thistles of his beloved Cookham landscape—the Berkshire village where he was born (which also inspired Kenneth Grahame).
Poignantly, this must depict one of the last happy moments Spencer enjoyed there, as he illadvisedly divorced his first wife, Hilda, and married Patricia Preece two years later, an act that did not in the slightest affect the latter’s long-term partnership with lover and fellow artist Dorothy Hepworth. The two women continued to live together in Spencer’s house (he moved out and was refused when he requested a divorce)—they even went on honeymoon together, without Spencer, whose art then took on a new and powerful (not always popular) direction, leading to his series entitled ‘The Beatitudes of Love’, about mismatched couples.
‘Spencer’s aching sense of loss and confusion is evident in his unique evocation of the frailty of human condition that was seminal to the development of modern British art, without whom Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Grayson Perry would not be as we know them today,’ explains art historian Amanda Bradley Petitgas. Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill is currently on display in the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, Berkshire, until March 24. It will then go on loan to the exhibition ‘Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: an Untold Story’, running from March 27 to September 8 at Charleston’s new space in Lewes, East Sussex, which opened last year.
National treasure: Stanley Spencer’s Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill (1935)