That Marvellous Atmosphere, Stanley Spencer Gallery: Intoxicating mayhem in a quaint Berkshire village

That Marvellous Atmosphere at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham hones in on the artist’s last major work, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1952-9). The ambitious painting, just over 2m x 5m, was nine years in the making and left unfinished upon Stanley’s untimely death in 1959. It relocates the New Testament episode of Christ preaching from a boat on Lake Galilee to the Grand Evening Concert at the Cookham Regatta. Christ, clad in a black boater and cassock, lunges, fire and brimstone, out of his wicker chair aboard the old horse ferry barge towards the assembled villagers, in their Sunday best.

For those who are not familiar with Spencer’s unorthodox work, the adaptation of biblical stories to a familiar socio-temporal iconography was an idiosyncratic part of his oeuvre. Some of his most famous paintings present religious scenes through the lens of the historic Thames-side village in which he grew up, most notably The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (1924-7), which depicts Stanley’s contemporaries rising from the dead at the graveyard of the local Holy Trinity Church.

Spencer is also known for his more provocative works. His paintings have sparked controversy as recently as 2023, when Love Among the Nations (1935) was deemed too “racist” to keep on show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Curator Dr Amy Lim succinctly sums up the artistic world of Stanley Spencer as “God, sex and Cookham”. He considered the village in which he grew up to be a “Holy Suburb of Heaven” and often used his childhood memories as fodder for creative inspiration.

This directs us back to the centrepiece of the Spencer Gallery’s summer exhibition, which draws on the artist’s recollection of the Cookham Regatta, a bustling social event that took place on Ascot Sunday to conclude the week of races in June. At its peak in 1890, the regatta was attended by 10,000 people, and the popularity of boating on the Thames is reflected in contemporary literature such as Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), which was written in the nearby Cookham Dean. The Spencer family’s keen interest in the festivities is documented by Spencer’s brother Gilbert who recalled “how the gentry and their ladies in their evening clothes joined in with the hoi polloi … the mix-up was attractive and complete”.

Spencer funnelled his whole imaginative world into this last great painting. His writings record that he stayed up sketching until four in the morning, and one of the studies on show was drawn on loo paper – it seems there wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t thinking about Christ Preaching. Unfortunately, Spencer was fiscally irresponsible and romantically indecisive (he at one point had two wives simultaneously, and ended up divorcing both). This meant that he spent the final decade of his life fulfilling commissions in order to support himself, rather than working on his less commercial passion project.