‘Heaven On Earth’: Inside Stanley Spencer’s Vision Of Christ At The Cookham Regatta
The English painter Stanley Spencer had fond memories of the Cookham Regatta, which was once the pinnacle of the Thames-side village’s social calendar. Taking place every June, it attracted thousands of visitors for a day of punting and rowing races, topped off with an illuminated procession of boats and a grand evening concert.
The regatta was in its heyday when Spencer was a boy, and it was his recollections of its “marvelous atmosphere” that provided him with the perfect setting for his final monumental canvas, “Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta” (1952-59), which remained unfinished at his death.
The painting takes an episode from the Synoptic Gospels, in which Christ preaches to a large crowd from a boat on Lake Gennesaret (the Sea of Galilee; Luke 5:1-3), and sets it during the Cookham Regatta. The enormous canvas teems with people and activity. Jesus preaches from the “horse ferry barge,” which becomes a floating pulpit, while the regatta-goers — from the smartly dressed “hoity-toity” visitors to the everyday folk of Cookham — listen from their boats and the nearby lawn of the Ferry Hotel.
“Spencer had been mulling over the idea of doing a painting of Christ preaching from a boat for a long time,” said Amy Lim, curator of the exhibition “That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta,” at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham. “He had explored the theme in early studies from the late 1920s, but it was not until around 1951 that he hit on the idea of tying it to his memories of the Regatta.”
Spencer believed that occasions of great joy could engender transcendental experiences, and he saw in the events of the regatta a spiritual dimension, especially the evening concert, which, after the hustle and bustle of the races, offered a time of reflection. He became obsessed with the regatta theme and, by March 1953, had completed more than a hundred preparatory drawings featuring different figures and groups.
The artist famously loved Cookham, describing the idyllic English village where he was born and lived for most of his life as “heaven on earth,” and he set many biblical scenes there. “In the same way that Renaissance painters set biblical episodes in the Italian countryside, Spencer was making the events of the Bible real and contemporary by setting them in the world that he knew,” Lim said.
“Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta” is on permanent display at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, in the former Wesleyan chapel on Cookham High Street, where the artist worshipped as a child. But, for the first time, this exhibition brings together drawings, studies and related paintings from his Regatta series that give insight into how he planned and painted it.
Several works on display directly depict vignettes from the principle composition, such as “Listening from Punts” (1954). “This picture shows a man who’s just been swimming; he’s standing in the bow of a punt, toweling himself off,” Lim said. “I’ve tried to hang the preparatory works so that they line up with the various places in the main canvas to which they relate, so you can see how they fit within the larger composition.”
She added: “We have a drawing, ‘Woman in a Pink Dress,’ which depicts the landlady of the Ferry Hotel. It is drawn at the same scale as she appears in the main painting.”
Indeed, many of the characters in Spencer’s great work are based on real people.
“We know that the figure of the ferryman, who stands in the foreground listening thoughtfully, is Jack Brooks, who used to take people across the river in his boat,” Lim added. “Spencer had an incredibly detailed back story in his imagination for every single character in the painting, most of which nobody would ever know, but he has thought through the stories of every person there.”
“Dinner on the Hotel Lawn” (1956-1957) by Stanley Spencer. Tate, Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1957. (Photo credit © Estate of Stanley Spencer)
Other regatta paintings, such as “Dinner on the Hotel Lawn” (1956-1957), on loan from Tate, depict episodes that do not appear in the main canvas. Here, various characters are seated at trestle tables, waiting for their food, an idea that Spencer could not accommodate in the larger composition.
Surprisingly, one of the characters that Spencer did not have much to say about was Christ himself, whom he shows barefoot, leaning forward from a basket chair to speak with a group of children.
“It’s odd that he never revealed what Christ was actually saying,” Lim said. “And I’ve always thought that Christ looks like he’s almost haranguing the children sitting in front of him.”
Christ’s demeanor is perhaps explained by the outfit that he and the disciples seated behind him are wearing.
“It’s a sort of a gray coat and gray straw boater,” Lim said. “Those are the outfits that the organizers of the Regatta wore, and they were the figures of authority. So perhaps Christ looks slightly fierce because he’s a kind of race marshal, who is exerting control over the festivities.”
Spencer’s conception of the painting changed several times. One early sketch depicts Christ standing upright in the foreground, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove perched on his head. Another placed Christ at the center of the river in a boat, with all of the other punts radiating in a star shape around him. Here, he leans towards a child in an adjacent vessel, who offers him the hand of her doll to shake — a visual device that Spencer likened to Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
“It is a lovely idea, and it’s a shame that he didn’t ever paint it,” Lim added.
What, then, is the message of “Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta”?
“Essentially it is all about love,” Lim said. “And I think on one level, it’s about Christ's love for the world and all of humanity. But I think it’s also about Spencer’s love for humanity, by which I really mean Spencer’s love for Cookham because that, for him, was a kind of microcosm of the whole world. The care with which he imagined, drew, and painted the assembled crowds became an expression of his love for everyone, from the hoity-toity to the hoi polloi.”
She continued: “But Spencer changed his mind a lot and often contradicted himself. At one point he described the painting as a kind of judgement scene, but his idea of the Day of Judgement was more like a birthday party, where everyone gets their hearts desires. His theology was unconventional, to say the least. There is no concept of separating the people into sheep and goats — for him, everybody was going to heaven.”
Spencer intended “Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta” to have a prominent place in his proposed chapel, which was known as the Church House, or “Church of Me.”
“This was a largely imaginary project filled with biblical paintings featuring Cookham and the people who had played an important role in his life,” Lim said. “‘Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta’ was to be the altarpiece of the river aisle, while the great painting of his early career, ‘The Resurrection, Cookham,’ was to hang as the altarpiece of the central aisle.”
Despite the importance of “Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta,” Spencer found himself distracted from the painting as he worked on commissions and the smaller Regatta paintings.
“By that time, he was in demand, and he was not wealthy: He needed the money,” Lim said. “He did, I think, slightly resent the fact that these other works took him away from working on ‘Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta.’”
By the late 1950s, his health was also failing, and in December 1958, he underwent surgery for cancer before his death a year later, leaving the painting three-fifths finished. The unfinished canvas, which was purchased by his patron Lord Astor, was posthumously exhibited at the 1960 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where one critic described it as “the epitaph of Genius.”
“It’s a shame that the painting was not finished, but for art historians, it’s a real gift,” Lim said, acknowledging that it provides unique insights into how this eccentric artist worked and, perhaps more significantly, the spiritual lens through which he saw the world.
“That Marvellous Atmosphere: Stanley Spencer and Cookham Regatta” is at the Stanley Spencer Gallery until Nov. 2.
David Trigg is a writer and art historian based in the U.K. He is the host of the “Exhibiting Faith” podcast. You can find him on Instagram @davidtriggwriter.