Verso: studies of soldiers in lines also for Camp at Karasuli

Pencil, 9 1/2 by 9 3/4 ins (23.5 by 25 cm)

Provenance: the estate of Daphne Charlton

The centre of this sheet is a clear study for a figure of a soldier delivering rations in the middle of Camp at Karasuli, the vast painting that occupies the upper part of the north wall of the chapel. Evidence of Spencer’s sometimes frantic energy during the project can be seen in the constant sketched repetitions of many of the scheme’s compositions. In the present case a thumbnail over a tent canopy (lower left of the sheet) may be a study for the painting Filling Water- Bottles (also in the chapel) whereas verso there is another study of lines of soldiers holding pans, also for the Camp at Karasuli.

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.