Introduction and Biography

Gilbert Spencer, RA (1892–1979) was one of the leading English landscape painters of the twentieth century, with his work rooted in a deep appreciation and understanding of the countryside. Versatile and wide-ranging, his output also encompassed portraits, war paintings, Biblical scenes and enigmatic imaginative figure compositions. Alongside his artistic practice, he enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an educator. Although in recent decades, his reputation has been eclipsed by that of his older brother, Sir Stanley Spencer (1892–1959), during their early careers they were equally highly regarded by critics. Thanks to recent scholarship and exhibitions, Gilbert is now beginning to emerge from his brother’s shadow.

Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sydney, William (Pa), Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, 1914

Gilbert was born in Cookham on 4th August 1892, just thirteen months after Stanley. As the youngest of nine surviving siblings, they enjoyed a close relationship and were brought up almost as twins. The Spencer household was lively and unconventional, and although the brothers received a patchy formal education in the back-garden school run by their elder sisters, it was more than compensated for by the family’s broad cultural and intellectual interests. Literature, politics and religion were discussed with intensity around the dining table, and all were highly musical; like his elder brothers, Gilbert was an accomplished pianist. ‘Pa’ William Spencer was a keen naturalist and taught his sons about the flora and fauna on their walks through the Berkshire countryside. Visual art, however, was something that they discovered for themselves. Whilst Stanley showed early talent in drawing and won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, Gilbert’s start was more uncertain. His aptitude for model-making led him to enrol in woodworking classes at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1911 and then the School of Art Wood-Carving at Thurloe Place, South Kensington, but woodwork proved not to his taste, and in January 1913, he followed Stanley to the Slade.

Gilbert Spencer at Garsington, 1925 (photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell)

Gilbert’s years at the Slade were some of the most vibrant in the institution’s history. He was tutored by Henry Tonks, Professor of Drawing, a superb draughtsman whose skill was anchored in his training as an anatomist and surgeon. But Gilbert also quickly honed his compositional skills, and although his ambitious painting The Seven Ages of Man (1913–14, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario) just missed out on first prize in the 1913 Summer Composition Competition, it became his first important sale when it was acquired for £100 by the Contemporary Art Society. Through Stanley, Gilbert was introduced to Edward Marsh, who bought a small painting, Feeding Pigs (1913, untraced), the first of many purchases by this leading patron. The following year, Gilbert won first prize at the Slade for figure drawing, as well as triumphing in the Summer Composition Competition with Summer (1914, UCL Art Collection). The outbreak of war in August 1914 put a temporary halt to his studies while he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Britain and the eastern Mediterranean. On his return in March 1919, he resumed his studies at the Slade, as well as the half-finished canvas Sashes Meadow (1914–19, Tate), which would become his first fully realised landscape painting.

Sashes Meadow, Cookham, 1914–19 (Tate, London)

It was during this final year at the Slade that Gilbert was introduced to a network of artists who would play an important part in his personal and professional development over the next decade. He became friendly with fellow-student Hilda Carline and by extension her family, all of whom were artists. Spencer was a regular guest at their home in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, becoming particularly close with Hilda’s brother Sydney. Although at first he entertained romantic feelings for Hilda, it was ultimately Stanley Spencer whom she chose, marrying him in 1925. Another influential friend and mentor was medic-turned-artist Henry Lamb, who in the summer of 1920 invited the Spencer brothers to join him on a painting holiday in Dorset. The county would become one of Gilbert’s most beloved destinations, his summer home for many years, and the subject of abundant paintings.

Still smarting from his rejection by Hilda, in early 1921 Gilbert moved to Caversham near Reading where he lodged with fellow Slade artist Thomas Saunders Nash and his wife Mabel. By Mabel's account, she and Gilbert soon fell in love and their subsequent affair resulted in the birth of a son, Peter, in December 1922. By this time, however, Gilbert had left Caversham. On learning of Mabel's pregnancy, Stanley made an unannounced visit and took his brother away, ostensibly for a painting weekend. Gilbert never returned, nor did he publicly acknowledge paternity of Peter. 

Gilbert was also drawn into the circle of artists, writers and intellectuals around Lady Ottoline and Sir Philip Morrell at their home of Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. Before the war, Henry Lamb had brought Lady Ottoline to Cookham to meet the Spencer brothers, and on renewing their acquaintance at the Goupil Gallery in 1923, she invited Gilbert to Garsington. Within weeks he had moved into lodgings at nearby Blenheim Cottages, with ‘knock and enter’ rights to the Manor, where his sociable, down-to-earth nature helped him to integrate into the illustrious company. As a founder member and adviser to the Contemporary Art Society, Lady Ottoline was instrumental in the acquisition of several of Spencer’s works by this important taste-making body. As well as widening his circle, his Oxfordshire years (1923–27) provided Spencer with plenty of agricultural subjects through which he developed his speciality in farm scenes.

The 1930s marked a change in Spencer’s personal and professional life, with a move to London followed swiftly by marriage to Ursula Bradshaw, on New Year’s Eve 1930. London life was leavened with summers in Dorset, where from 1932 the Spencers rented Burdens Farmhouse near Twyford. The success of A Cotswold Farm (1930–31, Tate), purchased for the nation through the Chantrey Bequest from his solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1932, led to a commission to paint a mural scheme at Holywell Manor, the new student accommodation at Balliol College, Oxford (The Legend of Balliol, 1934–36). Spencer would later paint murals for University College London (The Scholar Gypsy, 1954–56, destroyed) and the Royal Academy of Arts (An Artist’s Progress, 1959).

Gilbert and Ursula's move to Tree Cottage in Upper Basildon, Berkshire in the autumn of 1936 coincided with the birth of their daughter Gillian. Gilbert's marriage also facilitated a new relationship with his son. Ursula contacted Mabel (now Coppock) and initiated a meeting with Peter, who was ten years old. Peter was subsequently welcomed to the Spencers' home and Gilbert took responsibility for his education at Magdalen College School, Oxford. Peter spent most of his holidays with the Spencers, but despite a strong family resemblance, Gilbert continued to be awkward and embarrassed if asked about their connection, always maintaining that Peter was just a friend of the family. 

Professor Gilbert Spencer, c.1950

Teaching provided a regular income to supplement the sale of Spencer’s paintings, as well as an enjoyable camaraderie. After five happy years teaching alongside Sydney Carline and John Nash at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford, in 1929 Sir William Rothenstein offered Spencer a teaching job at the Royal College of Art in London, where he stayed for almost twenty years, including wartime evacuation to Ambleside in the Lake District. He was swept from his professorship in 1948 by the reforming broom of new Principal Robin Darwin, but was swiftly appointed Head of Painting at Glasgow School of Art. He stayed in Glasgow just two years, before returning to London as Head of Painting at Camberwell School of Arts, where he had begun his own studies some four decades earlier, and stayed, not entirely happily, until his retirement in 1957.

Spencer exhibited widely and prolifically at a variety of institutions and commercial galleries, principally in England but occasionally abroad. He became a member of the avant-garde New English Art Club in 1920, but from 1922 to 1932, his principal exhibition venue was William Marchant’s Goupil Gallery in London. Besides its biannual group exhibitions, the Goupil gave him his first solo show in January 1923 and a second in March 1929, as well as joint exhibitions with Mark Gertler and John Nash in 1926, and Neville Lewis and John Nash in 1928. After the Goupil’s demise, he transferred to the Leicester Galleries, which mounted exhibitions of his work in 1934, 1939, 1943, 1946 and 1949. Spencer’s work was also shown at British Empire touring exhibitions and the Venice Biennale, as well as many smaller exhibitions, and in 1940, he was especially proud to have four works included in the National Gallery’s inaugural temporary exhibition, British Painting Since Whistler. He made his debut at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1932 with A Cotswold Farm(1930–31, Tate), and was elected ARA in 1950 and full Academician in 1959, exhibiting almost every year from 1945 to 1973. He was also elected to the Royal Watercolour Society, the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, and the Royal West of England Academy.

Spencer maintained a steady reputation throughout his career, with his landscapes consistently garnering high praise from the critics, though it was his figurative works of the 1930s — A Cotswold Farm and The Legend of Balliol — that generated the most headlines. When news of the former reached Cookham, Stanley was somewhat discomfited to find himself ‘brothered of’: that is, relegated to the status of ‘brother of the painter of the farm picture.’ In 1964, Reading Art Museum mounted a major retrospective exhibition, which Gilbert took as an opportunity to review his work, annotating his catalogue with comments such as ‘very good’, ‘rather innocent’, and ‘needs cleaning’. The Fine Art Society hosted a smaller retrospective in 1974, coinciding with the publication of Spencer’s Memoirs of a Painter.

Gilbert Spencer in Suffolk, c.1970s

In 1970 Spencer retired from Berkshire to Suffolk, where he was supported by his friends the Martineau family until his death on 14 January 1979. Half a century on, the acquisition of the Gilbert Spencer archive by the Arts University Bournemouth precipitated a landmark year for Gilbert Spencer in 2024, with the publication of Paul Gough’s monograph, exhibitions of around thirty works at Abbot Hall, Kendal and seven at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, and the creation of this online catalogue. With the enduring appeal of landscape painting, and his active role in some of the most important institutions and networks of the twentieth-century art world, Gilbert Spencer’s place in British art history now seems assured.