Stanley Spencer: The Colours of the Clyde

In May 1940, during one of the darkest hours of the 20th century,

an artist arrived at Port Glasgow on the River Clyde.

His name was Stanley Spencer.

Over the next six years,

he forged one of the greatest cycles of paintings in British art.

A portrait of industry, war,

and the inextinguishable human spirit.

I'm Lachlan Goudie, and I'm also an artist.

For several years I've been drawing and painting in the Clyde shipyards.

Stanley Spencer's paintings have been a huge inspiration to me,

but I've always wondered why such a quintessentially English

artist was drawn to the subject of Scottish shipbuilding.

What did he find here that provoked such a radical series of canvases?

To find out, I'll be talking to Spencer's shipyard gave.

The man was so tied up in sketching and art

and painting, that that came before anything else in his life.

I'll uncover the early sketches which inspired these

monumental canvasses.

-This is a beautiful drawing.

-Yes, and we're lucky to have it

because of course he gave away a lot of his portraits to people.

And by exploring the world of Spencer's paintings,

I hope to better understand the revelation that awaited him

beyond the gates of the shipyard.

Stanley Spencer left wartime England

in search of hope, love and redemption.

And he would find them all here, by the Clyde.

Any river is a place of constant change.

But on the Clyde change has been dramatic.

BAE Systems in Govan where I work as an artist is one of the last

places on the river where ships are still built.

But just upstream at the Riverside Museum

you can still catch a glimpse of history.

This painting - Burners - was created by Stanley Spencer

in August 1940, whilst the Battle of Britain raged.

But it depicts an unexpected struggle -

the men whose mission it was to tailor a ship from steel.

And this world, these people - they still exist.

I recognise them along with Spencer's tumbling perspectives,

from the hours I've spent gazing down from the gantries in Govan shipyard.

But whereas I'm intrigued by engineering spectacle,

what's crucial for Spencer is the human element.

People dominated his paintings and his creative philosophy.

Spencer's yearning to explore the human heart of a place

had its source in another community, another river -

Cookham by the Thames.

Stanley was born in this small village in 1891.

He spent his childhood summers bathing in the Thames with his brothers.

And as he grew older, those early memories of happy innocence

were sanctified in his mind.

Recollection and reality became blurred.

In his imagination, Cookham was transformed into an earthly paradise.

"Resurrection: Cookham," completed in 1927.

Never has England looked more like God's own country.

It's a painted Hallelujah, a blossoming vision that celebrates

the promise of resurrection.

But instead of halos and angels' wings, Stanley brings together

family and friends as the naked and the dead.

From the suffocating subsoil of Cookham graveyard,

he elicits a flowering of wonder and joy.

But of course Spencer was no stranger to death.

He had served as a medical orderly during the World War I

and later wrote, "I buried so many people,

"I felt that death could not be the end of everything."

No-one, however, least of all Stanley, could have known

how many graves were awaiting as a new war engulfed Europe.

Spencer was 48 when the German panzers rolled into Poland,

too old to be called up.

But he was eager to offer his services to the new government body charged with commissioning war art.

Spencer's first proposal reflected his religious preoccupations -

a large allegorical crucifixion representing the suffering of Poland.

But the War Artist's Advisory Committee

had a very different subject in mind for the visionary from Cookham.

In the spring of 1940, Stanley Spencer,

the artist of peace, domesticity and spiritual contemplation,

was sent to paint a picture of shipbuilding.

# When days are burdened With sorrow...#

The shipyards of the Clyde weren't exactly a pretty picture.

But with the nation desperately reliant on supplies

shipped from overseas, they were now on the front line.

And the government wanted an artist to record their vital work.

Spencer's destination was Port Glasgow.

This small riverside town was once the thumping heart of British shipbuilding.

And this was once the site of Lithgow's Shipyard.

Today you have to imagine the steel hulls careering through the aisles of baked beans and Pot Noodles.

But during World War II, more merchant tonnage was launched from here than anywhere else in Britain.

When Stanley Spencer arrived in Port Glasgow in May 1940

he was understandably nervous - well out of his comfort zone.

To help him find his bearings he was introduced to a shipyard chaperone.

John Dodds was a foreman welder at the Lithgow's Kingston yard

when he was given the job of looking after the disorientated artist.

What was it like working there as a welder?

Very rough. Very rough.

You were working out in the open at all times

and you were expected to do that unless the weather became

absolutely inclement and it was impossible to work.

But Stanley was not dressed for that sort of thing.

And you felt to a certain extent a little bit sorry for him.

He just had the barest pair of trousers

and a jacket on and a shirt.

His footwear was absolutely pathetic!

You know, we were wearing at that time boots.

But Stanley had on a pair of shoes

that we would have worn going to a dance!

But he seemed to put up with that.

The man was so tied up in sketching and art and painting that

that came before anything else in his life.

And tell me, did those other men that he observed working...

What did they think about Stanley?

Did they think he was unusual in any way or...?

Well, the most I ever heard anyone saying is, "He's a strange person."

He wasn't what you would say talkative.

He didn't sort of break into conversation.

He was just a quiet, really nice man.

To give you an instance of that, about ten o'clock what we had

in Port Glasgow was a morning roll with some butter or margarine on it,

or jam if it was possible.

But the hardest job was to get him taking some butter or margarine

because that actually came from rations

and he felt as if he was using your rations there.

The point was, the man was so considerate

you couldn't be otherwise than take to him.

Behind the unassuming appearance was a fiercely determined artist.

Spencer immediately got down to work.

To begin with, it must have been a bewildering experience.

As I've discovered, the labyrinthine world of the shipyard

is difficult to summarise in a sketchbook.

Compressing all this complexity onto one sheet of paper is a challenge.

But by sketching, you begin to understand the structures more clearly.

And Spencer was an exquisite draughtsman. He was forensic

in gathering up all the precise details of this strange, new environment.

Many of the studies Spencer produced at Lithgow's yard

are held at the Imperial War Museum in London.

We have over 150 of these drawings.

And there are a whole range of them.

This one is a really interesting example

because it's an architectural study of the inside of a ship.

I'm sure a bit like what you've been looking at recently in the shipyards.

It's wonderful also the sheer complexity of what

he is managing to compress in here.

Yes, he was strongly interested in the technique

of Renaissance painters.

So observational drawing, draughtsmanship,

was very important for the way he was making work.

You can see some of that legacy in his portrait drawings

of some of the workers in the shipyard.

This is a beautiful drawing.

Yes, and we're lucky to have it,

because of course he gave away a lot of his portraits to people.

At the same as he's doing this lovely moulding.

Lots of lovely shading.

Shading, yes, exactly. His mind's always elsewhere.

He's thinking of the final thing

and here's a compositional study for "Welders".

This is dated May 1940, one of his first visits

and he's already thinking of compositions.

Absolutely. He was thinking big from the start.

So his head is in all different kinds of places, he's doing

very careful technical studies, portraits and also quick sketches.

Yes. He's working very fast here,

and trying to get the shapes with people moving.

And in this one here, which bears similar traits of very speedy

note-making, what's happening here?

He's patched the drawings together so he's starting to think about

how can these different scenes come together?

You kind of get a real insight into the way he's thinking

and the way he produces his art work.

I love the way he's been drawing away and he thinks,

"God, I can't fit these guys in here

"so I need to stick on another sheet of paper."

Yes, you can get a bit of the excitement and the energy through this drawing.

It was very loud, very noisy,

there would have been a lot of movement going on.

-A shipyard's not an easy studio to have.

-No, I can imagine.

It wasn't just the clamour and commotion

that made it difficult to capture the life of the shipyard.

High quality drawing paper was in short supply during the war.

The ever-resourceful Spencer, though,

came up with an ingenious solution.

He swapped sketchbooks for toilet rolls.

Good waxy, wartime stuff.

This allowed him to record the activity of the shipyard in one continuous outline.

But it also provided him with a great party piece -

no doubt he enjoyed the crowds that swarmed around him

as he unfurled his cyclorama of lavvy paper.

For Stanley Spencer there was an earthiness and honesty

about Port Glasgow that he instinctively responded to.

This community, bound by close ties of family and friendship, was deeply familiar.

It reminded him of Cookham.

But this was a place that still bore the scars of the Depression

when 11 out of 12 men were unemployed.

For any other artist, tough, industrial Port Glasgow

would have seemed like the wilderness.

But the truth was that Spencer already knew what the real wilderness felt like.

For most of Spencer's life,

Cookham had been his creative and emotional fulcrum.

His life and art all hinged on this village by the Thames.

"Resurrection: Cookham" commemorates this, but it also celebrates

the person who had unlocked his happiness and spiritual philosophy.

At the heart of the painting, asleep amongst the ivy,

is the figure of Hilda Carline.

Stanley married Hilda - a gifted artist in her own right -

in 1925 while he was in the midst of painting his masterpiece.

But Stanley Spencer's very English Eden

was about to be visited by temptation.

One afternoon, sitting in a local tearoom,

Stanley Spencer looked up to find an unexpected vision before him.

Her name was Patricia Preece.

Preece was a young artist who had come to live in Cookham.

Spencer was entranced.

Over the next eight years, he was gripped

by an intense sexual obsession.

His marriage to Hilda crumbled and in 1937 they divorced.

Within days Stanley married Patricia,

but the union was never consummated

and effectively collapsed in a matter of weeks.

Spencer had slipped his moorings.

The paintings lost their sense of direction

and his dealer struggled to shift the new canvasses.

Emotionally adrift and deep in debt,

Spencer fled Cookham, his Eden no more.

There were few people for whom the onset of World War II

was anything other than disastrous.

But in many ways it was the war

and the assignment to Port Glasgow that saved Stanley.

When the War Artists Committee dispatched him into the North,

they expected Spencer to return with material for a canvas or two.

But released from the emotional chaos of life in England,

inspiration began to nudge at the artist.

In his imagination there emerged the idea for a project

that was breathtaking in its intensity and scale.

In the archives of Tate Britain in London

there's a tantalising clue to Spencer's growing ambition.

So this is one of Stanley Spencer's notebooks from 1941.

It's very fragile, hence the gloves.

And on the inside cover is this unremarkable looking sketch.

What it illustrates is an extraordinary proposal -

68 separate panels inspired by the trades of the shipyard.

You've got burners here. Riveters. Platers, and on and on.

Paintings up to 15 feet in length, hung in multiple tiers

across the walls of a purpose-built space.

It's a cathedral for industry.

This is an awesome vision, but Spencer didn't just dream it up.

Less than a decade earlier he had decorated

the Sandham Memorial Chapel in the Hampshire village of Burghclere.

Inspired by the layout of an Italian Renaissance chapel,

it was an epic format for a personal and poignant cycle

of paintings about the Great War.

Over on the left, you see a man who's being cut out of the wire.

All these things, which were previously war themes,

are now having to behave as the bringers

of the happy message of the resurrection.

Spencer's commission on the Clyde followed this ambitious template

and provoked an equally life-affirming installation.

Like Burghclere, the shipbuilding paintings would reveal

a very intimate experience of overwhelming events.

A painting like Burners

isn't a portrayal of men crushed by industry.

Nor is it a propagandist celebration of robotic workers

powered by the state.

For me, these men appear absorbed by their craft.

And although the reality of bombs and destruction

seems strangely absent,

I think that Spencer manages to draw out the ideals

for which war was fought -

community, self-worth, freedom, love.

This is what the sacrifice of war was meant to defend.

It's perhaps no surprise that when Burners was exhibited

in the first War Artist's Exhibition

at the National Gallery in London, the response was ecstatic.

Spencer's industrial altarpiece

became one of the most popular prints of World War II

and helped revive his reputation.

His patrons in government wanted more.

It was a watershed moment,

because in spite of the unparalleled contribution of industry

to British history,

until this point the number of artists

who had explored the subject on canvas was shockingly small.

But in World War II, the country's leading artists

were commissioned to paint a vital and previously invisible,

"backstage Britain" -

shipyards, steel plants, armament factories.

Spencer, though, couldn't help but look

at the industrial landscape differently.

Like most artists when confronted with a subject on this scale,

I'm always looking upwards,

craning my neck in order to capture the vast drama.

But Spencer instead looks from side to side.

He gives us a long, close-cropped storyboard.

Spencer's unusual horizontal format was a compositional decision.

But it might also have been influenced

by the circumstances in which he worked.

He didn't actually create the shipbuilding series in Port Glasgow.

Instead Spencer worked up his pencil studies

in a series of lodging rooms in the south of England.

Without the space for enormous paintings,

he simply tacked narrow rolls of canvas to the walls

and broke out the brushes.

Methodically he would work his way across an image,

from one side to the other,

never blocking in the colours all at once.

He would use very thin sable brushes, feathering small marks

over the canvas, so that by applying the pigment very thinly

you could create a dry and chalky, resembling a Renaissance fresco.

You can even see here the canvas coming through the paint.

It's an extraordinarily retentive way to work.

But in many ways, it tells us all we need know

about Spencer as a person -

cautious, obsessive, controlling. Neurotic, perhaps.

But despite this fragile surface,

Spencer boldly evokes an intense and claustrophobic world.

It's when he pulls back that the work is less successful.

This lower canvas is the Template

and it's perhaps my least favourite painting.

Instead of tight focus,

Spencer shows us the huge hull of a ship

and a unique glimpse of the river in the background.

But to me it all seems a little bit unresolved,

and there's one detail which may help explain why.

It's this mother and her young child.

Wives and children weren't actually allowed into the shipyard.

But this mother and her infant

depicted at the heart of Spencer's composition

could be a cipher for some of the important people

at the centre of his own world.

Despite his divorce from Hilda Carline,

Spencer remained passionately attached to her and their children.

But whilst he was trying to complete the Template,

Hilda suffered a psychological breakdown.

Stanley hurried to help attend to her and his daughters.

After a period of emotional upheaval,

Spencer eventually returned to work on the Shipbuilding Series.

But the war artist was becoming war-weary

and his original master plan lost momentum.

In the end he produced only eight out of the original scheme

for up to 68 paintings.

Creative and emotional tides

were pulling Spencer in a different direction.

In 1944, while on one of his sketching visits to Port Glasgow,

Spencer met Charlotte Murray,

the German-born wife of the high school art master.

Spencer and Murray were soon involved

in an intense physical and intellectual relationship.

A psycho-analyst and student of Jung,

Murray encouraged Spencer to revisit the spiritual idealism

of his pre-war work.

As the war approached its end,

the artist was ready for a new epiphany.

The story is that one evening, at his Port Glasgow lodgings,

the landlady's son began to practise on his new drum kit.

Spencer escaped outside and wandered the streets of the town.

After a little while he emerged at the hillside cemetery.

"It was," he wrote later,

"like arriving at an idea before I was ready for it."

Port Glasgow Resurrection wasn't part of the war art commission,

but in many ways it's an alternative centrepiece

for the Shipbuilding cycle.

Completed by Spencer in 1950,

it welcomes on stage the loved ones from outside the shipyards.

It's a great orgy of joy,

now possible in a world resurrected from war.

And there amongst the crowds bursting from the earth

are some familiar faces -

Charlotte Murray, being helped out of a grave...

..and at the centre of the painting,

a kneeling representation of Stanley and Hilda.

Between 1944 and 1950,

Spencer worked on a series of nine celebratory visions

of Port Glasgow cemetery.

In many ways they brought him full circle,

revisiting the rapturous, transcendent scenes

that had defined his early career.

But, for me, his wartime shipbuilding paintings

are unsurpassed.

They are the canvasses we should celebrate.

They are Spencer's hymn to Port Glasgow,

its people and to the industry that revived his creative passion.

The Govan yard where I paint is one of the last on the River Clyde.

Spencer wouldn't recognise this industrial panorama any more,

so much has changed and is changing.

Even the last of the cranes, those proud landmarks,

are now being demolished.

But if we were to take one final stroll around the yard together,

the human landscape would be entirely familiar to him.

The figures, the faces, the trades being undertaken,

the devotion, the community -

all of that still survives.

Spencer came to believe that even during the most difficult times,

art could always throw light into our wilderness.

And, from the moment he was secure in that faith,

he declared, "Every tomorrow has seemed as the world to come."

In the shipyards of Port Glasgow,

when all the world was loaded with tragedy and pessimism,

Spencer didn't just ignore the darkness.

He simply painted for people a vision of "Tomorrow"

that they could all fight for, believe in and build together.