Pencil, 7 by 10 1/4 ins (18 by 26 cm)

Provenance: the estate of Daphne Charlton

Two large cartoons for the chapel from 1923 in the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham reveal several significant changes in Spencer’s ideas for the arched panels on the interior’s north and south walls. These early studies show that he originally intended the third panel from the entrance on the north wall to depict a scene in an operating theatre from his time in Bristol. The present sheet shows two very rare studies for this composition. Eventually abandoned the operating theatre scene may have proved a more direct subject than some of its more rudimentary neighbouring depictions of day-to-day life.

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.