Sepia wash over pencil, diameter approx 18 cm

Provenance: the Stanley Spencer Studio Sale, Christie’s, 1998

The presence of this and another design amongst drawings for the chapel sold at the artist’s studio sale identify them as amongst only a few surviving mosaic floor tile designs that Spencer had originally intended for the floor of the chapel. In the end financial constraints on the project meant this was one element that had to be sacrificed: “a number of immediate concessions had to be made; the ambitious floor mosaics of squares and hexagonals…describing domestic and hospital scenes – was abandoned…” (Paul Gough, Stanley Spencer, Journey to Burghclere, Sansom & Co., 2006, p.105).

Drawings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel by Stanley Spencer

Spencer’s monumental scheme for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere occupied his time and imagination for nearly a decade between 1923 and the paintings’ completion in 1932. Chronicling the surprising and everyday elements of the artist’s Wartime life first as a medical orderly in Bristol and later with the infantry in Macedonia, the chapel and Spencer’s seventeen paintings for it were commissioned in memory of the brother of his patron Mary Behrend who had died in the First World War. Having opened to mixed reception at the time it is now regarded as one of Spencer’s most enduring masterpieces and one of the greatest statements of figurative British art from the early part of the twentieth century. As an example of War art, Simon Jenkins has even compared it in its importance to the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and Britten’s War Requiem as amongst the “most moving monuments to twentieth-century war.” The paintings were the subject of a recent book Stanley Spencer, Journey to Burghclere by Paul Gough (published by Sansom & Co in 2006) and subsequent exhibitions at Somerset House, London and Pallant House, Chichester. This rare group of drawings for the scheme have been collected from the artist’s studio sale at Christie’s in 1998 and the collection of Spencer’s artist friend and briefly muse and lover Daphne Charlton.