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| Washing Lockers |
Sandham Memorial Chapel is an undemonstrative redbrick
building by Lionel Pearson, in the Hampshire village of Burghclere. Small and
low, with two almshouses as wings, it sits at the end of a lawn, partially
screened from the road by trees and fence, quite at home in a landscape of
green fields, thick hedgerows and temperate winds. The Chapel is an Oratory of
All Souls, and was dedicated in 1927 as a private memorial to Lieutenant
Willoughby Sandham, who died in 1919 from an illness contracted in the
Macedonian campaign.
This unobtrusive place is also one of the most remarkable
monuments to have emerged from a war in any country, for its interior walls are
painted by Stanley Spencer, with scenes recollected from his own war experience
and transfigured into deeply religious images. At one remove from the bustle
and publicity of galleries, and detached from the relentless rush of media
images of today’s conflicts, the Chapel, and the masterpiece it houses, offers
something increasingly rare – an apt space for contemplating serious things. It
is a quiet place in which to consider war, and man in war, and the redeeming
powers of art.
The paintings of Sandham Memorial chapel are rooted in the
personal experience of the artist. The bare facts can be briefly told. In 1915
the 24-year-old Stanley Spencer enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and
was stationed as a medical orderly at the Beaufort war Hospital in Bristol. In
August the next year he volunteered for active service overseas and, after
training at Tweseldon Camp near Farnham in Surrey, was stationed in Salonika
(in Macedonia) with the 68th field Ambulances. In October 1917
Spencer retrained as an infantryman with the 7th Battalion of the Royal
Berkshire Regiment, and spent some months on the front line. All of these
places figure in the Sandham paintings. A bout of malaria brought Spencer home,
where, under orders as a commissioned official war artist, he painted the first
of his works dealing with war, Travoys with Wounded Soldiers arriving at a
Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia (1919, now in the Imperial War Museum).
Travoys is not part of the Sandham scheme, but it
anticipates in theme and technique much of what Spencer was to explore in the
later work. Its subject is not the destruction of battle, but rather man’s
capacity for creative, collaborative work. It is about the making of persons,
not the breaking of bodies. In harmonious alliance with the men, a line of
mules brings the wounded on stretchers to a dressing station. Mules and men
look towards a lighted space beyond them, where medical staff treat a patient.
Positioned above and behind the group, like a ghostly spectator, we look in
too. The scene is imbued with lineaments of Christian iconography: we are
reminded of the shepherds and kings looking on at the glowing stable of the
infant Christ. These echoes of the miraculous are resolutely located in the
real: the details of uniforms and harness are carefully recorded, and nothing
is happening that could not have happened. Yet the scene has a powerful
atmosphere of transcendence: the emphasis is not on the characters as
individuals but on the way they are bound together by work and mutual help into
a compact of fellowship. Drama is evoked by a steep, almost vertical
perspective, which makes the pictorial space seem to thrust itself towards us.
The scene also anticipates the Sandham pictures with its suggestion of a
narrative, taking us from darkness to light, from suffering to salvation. The
mules, for which the artist evidently had a special affection, are to return,
at the centre of the great Resurrection scene on the East wall of the Chapel.
Over the next few years, Spencer produced some of his great
explicitly religious paintings, concentrating in particular on scenes from the
Passion. But memories of war burned within him: the Macedonian landscape
reappears, for example, in Crucifixion, taking the place of his usual
setting, his home village of Cookham. In 1923 he was staying with the painter
Henry Lamb, according to his host sitting ‘at a table all day evolving acres of
Salonica and Bristol war compositions’. By chance the two painters were visited
by Mr and Mrs J L Behrend (she was Sandham’s sister) who very soon decided to
commission Spencer’s work as the memorial work it is today.
Spencer is said to have replied to the commission with the
comment ‘What ho, Giotto!’, and Sandham Chapel is influenced in terms of
concept and arrangement by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua (though an early
experiment in imitating Giotto to the extent of using fresco failed). Spencer
was closely involved in the architectural design, framing the sequence of
images in arches and predella panels, and exploiting the large spaces of upper
wall spaces and the east wall to create complex large-scale compositions.
The context of the chapel affects our reading of the
paintings, too. They refer to each other in ways which would be impossible in a
gallery setting. The rhythm of arches, the disposition of small and large
spaces, creates a visual drama which depends on the space and light of this
particular architectural setting. Throughout, we feel a powerful religious
imagination, whereby minutely observed everyday items and daily routines are
invested with symbolic meaning. This is the journey of Everyman from darkness
and pain to the homecoming of the Resurrection and the revelation of the
sanctity of ordinary experience. It is, in the artist’s words, ‘a mixture of
real and spiritual fact’. Like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
it has at its centre the notion of epiphany, whereby normal things and events
reveal great mysteries.
This inhabitation of the concrete and material by the
spiritual is clear in the very first painting in the first arch on the north
wall, Convoy Arriving. A squat, colourful bus bearing wounded soldiers
arrives at the Beaufort War Hospital. The gates are swung open to allow its
entry. The details are based on remembered experience: a mean-looking warder is
apparently based on a real individual; his keys are the Burghclere chapel keys,
and the rhododendrons outside the gates are from Burghclere too. Everything
represented is taken from the real world. But in being painted it is transposed
to a new order of meaning. The opening image of an entry echoes our own entry
into the Chapel and signals an interior journey which will match the physical
journey of the soldiers’ healing. In the space of the chapel, connotations play
on the mind. Gates opening and keys suggest the keys of St Peter at the gates of
heaven, but equally, with the power of the bus and the stern warder, the
Harrowing of Hell; as the bus leaves the dense flowers for the bare drive, we
seem to see, repeated, the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden and
entry to the hardship of mortal life. As with Travoys, we notice a lack
of individualising expression among the patients, and a curious absence of
distinct intimate relationships: the people are bound together by situation, by
shared action, simply by being together.
Spencer’s pictures allude to Christian iconography, and also
have relations of tone and meaning with each other. Beneath Convoy Arriving
is the first predella picture, Scrubbing the Floor. All the predella
pictures stress the floor, the earth, and in them the vertiginous perspective
flattens out into a gravity-bound underworld – here marked by dark corridors
and the inner darkness of the troubled man obsessively scrubbing the floor. His
mental distress, and the awkward movements of the three others who step around
him, mark an emotional shift after the expectations of the wounded above. It is
through descent into this world, Spencer seems to be hinting, through the
discipline of menial work, that we are to be truly reunited and healed.
Perhaps, in the man’s body and the proximity of his hands to another man’s
feet, we catch an echo of Christ washing the feet of his disciples.
Once our mind is open to the play of associations, with no
fixed theological or narrative frame to restrict them, then we construe
Christian allusions throughout. Ablutions is a baptism, a representation
of inner cleansing, with the pattern of raised arms striking a gentle uplifting
note. The laid-out mats on which men lie in Kit Inspection are the
graves in which the dead wait for judgment, laying out their account of
themselves, each in his lonely space. And in the astonishing Dug-Out /
Stand-To, the soldiers are again somewhere between life and death, between
two worlds as they wait apprehensively for an onslaught, anticipated in the
cloud of barbed wire that seems about to descend. The trenches are open graves,
but this death is only a prelude to the Resurrection on the Eastern wall, to
which some men look in hope.
The Resurrection is a composition on a grand scale,
yet the individual details avoid the loud rhetoric of grandeur. There are no
heroic gestures, no postures or expressions of wonderment. The resurrected
shake hands, pile up their crosses and get on with the business of presenting
themselves to Christ, a small figure who seems rather overwhelmed by it all. As
in Pasolini’s film of St Matthew’s Gospel, the business of salvation is
entirely unceremonious. One man cuts another free from barbed wire. Another is
greeted by his dog. Some wind puttees.
The soldier on the smashed mule cart sits bemused, while driver and the mules
start to turn to Christ. What is moving is the way in which all seem to address
this salvation as if it were an absolutely normal activity. Just as the
ordinary is transfigured into spiritual symbol in Spencer, so the great providential
events become everyday happenings.
Iconographic references are equally rich on the southern
wall: the soldiers like angels with their floating army macs in Filling
Water Bottles; the dormitory feast image of bread and jam below in Tea
in the Hospital Ward, where the food might be the feeding of the five
thousand, and, taken in conjunction with the water above, a kind of Eucharist.
Yet the images survive the solemnity of such interpretation, for each one
preserves a real and interesting moment of human experience, of the life of
work and survival around the terrible fact of war.
In Sandham Memorial Chapel Spencer, who experienced war’s
depredations first-hand as a private soldier (he was in the ranks throughout),
is committed to finding a path to redemption. And he does this in a tradition
of English mysticism, in which a connection is found between simple external
detail and deep spiritual sensation, a mode of perception which stems from the
simple language of the New Testament itself: we find the same sensibility of
the numinous in the local, for example, in the writings of T F Powys. It is a vision beautifully described by Ivor
Gurney:
I believe
in the increasing of life: whatever
Leads to
the seeing of small trifles,
Real,
beautiful, is good …
…nor is anything done
Wiselier
than the moving or breaking to sight
Of a thing
hidden under by custom – revealed,
Fulfilled,
used (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight:
Trefoil –
hedge sparrow – the stars on the edge of night.
(The Escape)
Spencer, who when painting Ablutions spent half an
hour trying to remember what a sponge looked like then went home to get his
own, would have agreed with this. His art leads to the seeing of small trifles,
and in so doing elucidates the space of the soul. Born out of war, and charged
with a love of creation, Sandham Memorial Chapel is, in every brushstroke, an
increasing of life. It exists in
counterpoint to the powerful and distressing visions of other war artists like
Nash and Nevinson. How appropriate that, like Giotto’s Arena Chapel, it was
dedicated on 25th March, the date of the Feast of the Annunciation,
a visitation of earth by heaven.
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