Fernlea, Cookham

This view of the back of the Spencer family home, Fernlea, Cookham across Strand Meadows replicates the top half of Spencer’s Slade prize-winning Summer: Composition with Three Children Seated in a Meadow (1914, UCL Art Museum). It is likely to have been painted concurrently with the latter, perhaps as a preparatory study. It is suggested here that the present painting can be identified as Fremley, Cookham (a misprint for Fernley, an alternative spelling of Fernlea), exhibited and sold at the NEAC 53rd exhibition in 1915 (no. 75), and therefore Spencer’s earliest known landscape painting.

Date: c. 1913-4
Tags: Landscape, Oil Paintings
Medium: Oil on canvas
Height (mm): 500
Width (mm): 600
Location: Government Art Collection 4519
Exhibition History: NEAC 53rd exh 1915 (75); NEAC winter 1925 (91), lent by A.M. Daniel Esq.; Leicester Galleries 1958
Provenance: Sold at NEAC 1915; Sir Augustus M. Daniel by 1925; from whom purchased by the Leicester Galleries, London, as by Spencer Frederick Gore; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in March 1958.
Literature: Spencer 1974 p. 46; Gough 2024 p. 23, illus p. 24