Verso: studies of sleeping figures

Pencil, 9 by 7 1/4 ins (23 by 18 cm)

Provenance: the estate of Daphne Charlton

The painting Firebelt depicts the burning of grass around the soldiers’ camp in order to create a fire barrier. In this small preliminary study the artist depicts more expansive rows of tents than in the more condensed composition of the final painting.

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.