Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life.

As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore.

Eventually, Gilbert was sent to a school in Maidenhead, but the family did not feel this would be beneficial for Stanley, who was developing into a solitary teenager given to long walks, yet with a passion for drawing.

His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg.

for which he won a Slade Composition Prize and he also began painting Apple Gatherers, which was shown in the first Contemporary Art Society exhibition the following year.

[9] In 1915 Spencer volunteered to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps, RAMC, and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital, Bristol, a large Victorian gothic building that had been a lunatic asylum.

In all, Spencer spent two and a half years on the front line in Macedonia, facing both German and Bulgarian troops, before he was invalided out of the Army following persistent bouts of malaria.

[11] His survival of the war that killed so many of his fellows, including his elder brother Sydney,[12] who died in action in September 1918, indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death.

Spencer returned to England at the end of 1918 and went back to his parents at Fernlea in Cookham, where he completed Swan Upping, the painting he had left unfinished when he enlisted.

Spencer had begun the painting by making a small oil study and several drawings from memory before visiting Turks Boatyard beside Cookham Bridge to confirm his composition.

In 1919 Spencer was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to paint a large work for a proposed, but never built, Hall of Remembrance.

The resulting painting, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, now in the Imperial War Museum, was clearly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps.

[16] He wrote, "About the middle of September 1916 the 22nd Division made an attack on Machine Gun Hill on the Doiran Vardar Sector and held it for a few nights.

"[17][18]Spencer lived in Cookham until April 1920 when he moved to Bourne End to stay with the trade union lawyer Henry Slesser and his wife.

[19][20] In 1921 Spencer stayed with Muirhead Bone at Steep in Hampshire where he worked on mural designs for a village hall war memorial scheme which was never completed.

[24] To the left of the church some of the resurrected are climbing over a stile, others are making their way to the river to board a Thames pleasure boat, others are simply inspecting their headstones.

[31][32] Spencer did not depict heroism and sacrifice, but rather in panels such as Scrubbing the Floor, Bedmaking, Filling Tea Urns and Sorting and Moving Kit Bags,[26] the unremarkable everyday facts of daily life in camp or hospital and a sense of human companionship rarely found in civilian life as he remembered events from Beaufort, Macedonia and Tweseldown Camp.

"[23] The scene, Map Reading offers a contrast to the dark earth of the hospital and military camps in the other panels and shows a company of soldiers resting by a roadside paying little attention to the only officer depicted among the hundreds of figures Spencer painted for the chapel.

Bilberry bushes fill the background of the painting, making the scene appear green and Arcadian which seems to prefigure the paradise promised in the Resurrection of the Soldiers on the end, altar, wall.

[24] Working on the Memorial Chapel has been described as a six-year process of remembrance and exorcism for Spencer[15] and he explained the emphasis on the colossal resurrection scene, "I had buried so many people and saw so many bodies that I felt death could not be the end of everything.

Hilda was often in Hampstead as her elder brother was badly ill and when she was in Cookham life with her was not the cosy domestic idyll Spencer expected.

The original lay-out of the Church-House would have mirrored the geography of Cookham with the nave based on the High Street, while School Lane and the path beside the Thames would be the aisles.

Spencer had at least two significant affairs during his life, one with Daphne Charlton while at Leonard Stanley, and the other with Charlotte Murray, a Jungian analyst, when he was working in Port Glasgow,[33] and there were to be chapels dedicated to both of them.

These included the two paintings Spencer submitted for the 1935 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Saint Francis and the Birds and The Dustman or The Lovers.

He originally intended to paint a series of 40, one representing each day of Jesus's sojourn in the wilderness, but in the end only eight were completed and a ninth was left unfinished.

Spencer created many important works in his room above the bar of the White Hart Inn which he used as a studio, including Us in Gloucestershire and The Wool Shop.

WAAC held Spencer in the highest regard, and in particular Dickey ensured he received, almost, all the expenses and materials he requested and even accepted his refusal to fill in any forms or sign a contract.

Writing in his notebooks, Spencer attributed this to a revelation he had while in Port Glasgow working on the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, One evening in Port Glasgow when unable to write due to a jazz band playing in the drawing-room just below me, I walked up along the road past the gas works to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope...

[55] Members of the hastily assembled "cultural delegation" included Stanley Spencer, Leonard Hawkes, Rex Warner, Hugh Casson and A. J. Ayer.

Lord Astor made arrangements so that Spencer could move into his childhood home, Fernlea, and he died of cancer at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in December that year.