Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill, (1925) by Richard Carline
If you go back to My Daily Art Display for August 5th and the painting by Sir Stanley Spencer, you will find a mention of Richard Carline, as Spencer married his sister Hilda. Richard Carline was born in Oxford into a family of artists. It was an artistically talented family. Richard Carline’s parents, George and Annie Carline were both artists who married in 1885 and had five children and the three youngest of these Sydney, Hilda and Richard all became respected painters.
Richard Carline’s works included landscapes and portraits, often of his contemporaries. In 1913 Richard Carline enrolled at the Percyval Tudor-Hart’s Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, in Paris. Following a short period teaching, Carline served in World War I where he was appointed an Official War Artist. Along with his brother he became well-known for his war pictures from the air. In the 1920’s, the Carlines’ Hampstead home at Downshire Hill became a focus point for artists such as Henry Lamb, John Nash, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler who would have regular meetings there to discuss the arts. It was during this time that Carline was clearly influenced by Stanley Spencer, transforming everyday scenes into something monumental. Unlike Spencer, Carline achieved this without actually exaggerating figures or their gestures to the degree that Spencer did. In 1924 he started a five year stint teaching at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford. His first solo exhibition came about in 1931 at the Goupil Gallery in London. During the Second World War Carline supervised camouflage of factories and airfields. When the war was over, he was involved in helping to found the Hampstead Artists’ Council in 1944. In 1946-47 he was appointed as the first Art Counsellor to UNESCO, and from 1955 to 1974 was chief examiner in art for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. He also published a number of books including Pictures in the Post: the Story of the Picture Postcard, 1959; Draw They Must, 1968; and Stanley Spencer at War, 1978. The latter, I bought off eBay last week !!
Richard Carline died in 1980 aged 84.
The Carline family home, which George and Annie Carline bought in 1916, was 47 Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London and it was here that many artists would meet and discuss art, politics, religion and life in general. One of the regular visitors, the Australian-born British painter, Henry Lamb, described the artistic meetings as a veritable cercle pan-artistique. Many of the group would embark on painting holidays together.
My Daily Art Display featured painting today by Richard Carline, entitled Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, shows one such meeting of the Downshire Hill Circle. The painting was judged as one of Carline’s most impressive works. Before us we have a group portrait. From left to right we have Stanley Spencer, James Wood, Kate Foster, Hilda Carline (later to become Mrs Stanley Spencer), Henry Lamb, Richard Hartley, Annie Carline and Sydney Carline. Richard Carline was meticulous in his preparations for this work. He painted an oil study of each of the group before slotting them into his group portrait. His 1924 preparatory oil study of Stanley Spencer for this group portrait is also a stand-alone painting of his, entitled Study of Stanley Spencer. Looking at the study one has to presume that he hadn’t quite properly calculated the height of the preparatory study as he had to add Spencer’s shoes separately alongside the figure.
What enhances this group painting is the varied but individual characterization of each person. This was not done by accident as Carline said his intention was to somehow convey the individuality of the people assembled at his parent’s house. In his own words Carline described the group portrait:
“… [I] sought to convey the conflicting personalities gathered at our house – Stanley [Spencer] peering up and down as he expounded his views on this or that, James Wood hesitating in the doorway whether to come or go, Hilda absorbed in her own thoughts, Hartley sitting at ease, Lamb courteously attentive to my mother, with Sydney always helpful…”
This paintings, Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill, Hampstead , along with the Study of Stanley Spencer, are housed in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. It is a gallery I have never visited but looking at their website it is one I will put down as a “must visit” location.
Finally, I always like to imagine what a place, depicted in a painting, looks like today. I did this with my entry about Renoir’s boathouse in his painting Luncheon of the Boating Party which I featured in My Daily Art Display of August 2nd, so I wondered what the house at 47 Downshire Hill looks like today. So below is a picture of it I found of it on the internet!
A few days ago I watched a television programme which looked at twentieth century British artists and My Daily Art Display today looks at one of the paintings which the programme highlighted. It was a work of art by Sir Stanley Spencer, completed in 1937 and is entitled the Double Nude Portrait, sometimes known as Leg of Mutton Nude, for reasons we will look at later. I like this painting for its honesty but also because of the story behind it. It is a story of three people: Spencer and his two wives. In a way, it is a story about love, infatuation, lust and how bad decisions can change lives.
Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer was born in 1891 in Cookham, Berkshire, a small village on the River Thames, situated west of London. Spencer loved Cookham and was to spend most of his life living in this idyllic spot. He started his art studies at the age of seventeen when he attended the Slade School of Art, which was part of the University College, London, and where he remained for four years. The First World War intervened and Spencer joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915 and from there he transferred to the Berkshire Regiment the following year. He witnessed the savage conflict in Macedonia but he physically survived the war although mentally scarred by the horrors he encountered whilst in active service. Sadly, when he returned to Cookham after the war he learnt that his brother Sydney had been killed in the war three months earlier.
Hilda Carline
Whilst Stanley Spencer attended the Slade School of art he became friendly with a fellow student, Sydney Carline who was one of three children of the British painter and illustrator George Carline. Sydney had two younger artistic siblings, a brother, Richard and a sister Hilda. Although George Carline actively encouraged his two sons to become artists he never encouraged his daughter to follow the same path and she idled her time at home in Oxford. Eventually when she was twenty-four her father arranged for her to go to a London art school in Hampstead, which was run by Percyval Tudor-Hart. Such was her artistic progress that five years later, in 1918, aged twenty-nine, she also was admitted to the Slade School of Art. It was around this time that Sydney met Hilda when he was invited to a Carline family meal in 1919. Spencer was immediately smitten by the lovely Hilda and recalled that first meeting saying:
‘…As she came towards me … with the soup, I thought how extraordinary she looked … I could feel my true self in that extraordinary person….I felt she had the same mental attitude to things as I had. I saw myself in that extraordinary person. I saw life with her…..’
Within a few weeks of that first meeting Spencer wrote to Hilda asking to buy one of her paintings. He wrote:
‘…there is something heavenly in it and the more I look at it, the more I love it..”.
There followed a quite tempestuous courtship, their relationship had its ups and downs and had to withstand many heated arguments. Having said that, the couple spent a lot of time painting together and Spencer was very complimentary about her artistic talent. Hilda Carline went on to exhibit many of her works at the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club, an artists’ society, a society which was founded in 1886 in reaction against the conservatism of the Royal Academy.
In 1925 Hilda Carline and Stanley Spencer married at Wangford in North Suffolk, a place which was well known to Hilda as during the First World War she was stationed there as a Land Girl. By the end of the year Hilda had given birth to a baby girl, Shirin. During the next few years the couple moved around southern England until January 1932, at which time Stanley could afford to buy Lindworth, a comfortable residence in the centre of Cookham, with its tennis court and large garden. This was solely his choice as his wife would have preferred to live in central London to be close to the centre of the art world as well as being close to her widowed mother who still lived in Hampstead. For Stanley, returning to Cookham gave him the chance to recapture the early inspirational ecstasies which he called Cookham-feelings. Of this special feeling, and of his day in this idyllic setting, he once wrote:
“.. We swim and look at the bank over the rushes. I swim right in the pathway of the sunlight. I go home to breakfast thinking as I go of the beautiful wholeness of the day. During the morning I am visited, and walk about being that visitation. Now everything seems more definite and to put on a new meaning and freshness. In the afternoon I set out my work and begin my picture. I leave off at dusk, fully delighted with the spiritual labour I have done…”
So Stanley Spencer is delighted with his life and Hilda, his wife, is reasonably happy, so what could possibly go wrong with this idyllic lifestyle? Sadly Stanley like many of us didn’t appreciate what he had.
Patricia Preece
Enter the third person in this story – Patricia Preece. Patricia had, along with her artist friend and lesbian lover, Dorothy Hepworth, moved to the village of Cookham. It was in 1929, when Patricia working in the local High Street café first met Stanley Spencer. Stanley, Hilda and their daughter Shirin, who were visiting the village, came in to the café for lunch. After a conversation about their love for art Spencer invited the two women to visit the Spencer-Carline house parties and picnics and where she was often courted by Hilda’s brother Richard Carline. Spencer and Preece had, besides their art, another thing in common, their love of Cookham. This was in complete contrast to Hilda’s feelings for the village, a situation which saddened her husband.
The relationship between Spencer and Hilda and Patricia Preece started off well, in fact for the first three years they were best of friends and in 1933 Stanley Spencer and Patricia went off together on an artistic assignment in Switzerland with Hilda’s blessing. Richard Carline’s devotion to Patricia ended when he belatedly realised the truth about her relationship with her live-in lover Dorothy. Patricia now turned her attentions to Stanley Spencer, not for amorous reasons but for the reason of his extensive art world contacts which would help her and Dorothy with their artistic careers and also because she, who was comparatively poor, knew that Stanley was a wealthy man. Patricia’s financial situation worsened when the knitwear business of the Hepworth family, from which Dorothy received great financial remuneration, went bankrupt. By 1934, the life of the two women had reached crisis point, their Cookham home was about to be repossessed and they had no money to pay every-day bills.
From l. to r. Hepworth, Preece and Spencer
Stanley Spencer rode to the women’s rescue by suggesting they came to live with Hilda and him. Hilda was having none of her husband’s rescue plan. She also became very concerned by her husband’s closer than ever relationship with Patricia. She took comfort by leaving Cookham for periods of time along with her daughters, going to stay with her mother. Her absence from the family home was all that Patricia needed to get closer to Stanley. They would visit each other’s houses even though Patricia’s lover Dorothy was not best pleased with this blossoming relationship. Stanley and Patricia sadly had different agendas. For Patricia, Stanley Spencer’s money and contacts were of prime importance whereas for Spencer there was a sexual desire.
Hilda initially fought to save their marriage. However, when her brother George became seriously ill towards the end of 1932, she went to London to be with him. By 1934, she knew that she could no longer stay with her husband and moved to London. Spencer became more and more obsessed with the flirtatious Preece, and he showered her with gifts. She persuaded him to divorce his first wife and to sign his house over to her. Patricia Preece married Spencer in 1937 and they were supposed to go on honeymoon in Cornwall. Preece and Dorothy went on ahead and in fact Spencer never joined them, remaining in Cookham to finish a painting. Hilda went to Cookham and, finding a warm welcome from Spencer, spent the night with him. Spencer proposed a ménage à trois with her and Patricia but Hilda would not accept being his mistress, having once been his wife. Preece was shocked by this turn of events and refused thereafter to have sexual relations with him.
Double Nude Portrait by Sir Stanley Spencer (1937)
So that is the story of the three people and now let us look at the painting which Spencer completed in 1937, the year of his second marriage. It is a stark and explicit painting of the artist and his second wife Patricia Preece. It was painted at a time when Spencer realised the mistake he had made leaving his first wife Hilda and marrying this femme fatale. Look at the forlorn depiction he gave himself as he squats before his uncaring wife. His skin tone is a dull grey. We are not looking at a man of great virility. Whereas artists in the past have portrayed themselves or their sitters as virile and glamorous, we see in front of us an unidealized vision of a man. He stares down at the breasts of his wife but he is not aroused. Look at his flaccid penis which presumably alludes to his lack of virility and the non-consummation of his marriage. Look how Spencer has depicted Preece. She lays there, legs apart with a vacant look on her face. She does not look at Spencer. She exudes an air of disinterest. Spencer’s depiction of his wife acknowledges her rejection of him. There is no eye contact. The bodies are not touching. There is a total disconnect between husband and wife. You know the marriage is doomed. There are two other interesting objects in the painting. Firstly in the foreground we have a leg of mutton (hence the alternative title of the painting) and in the background we have a lit gas fire. We can presume that the cold leg of mutton somehow symbolises the coldness of his wife as she lies in front of him and it is in contrast to the heat from the fire which is the only thing in the painting which is going to give warmth to the artist.
Would you say the painting is erotic? Does it have the eroticism of a Schiele painting? To me, the painting is sexual but not erotic. It is an honest painting and tinged with sadness. Should we be sad for the artist or should we simply look upon him as somebody who has rightly got his just deserts? Could things get any worse for Spencer? Well, actually the answer to that is yes.
Preece being a gold-digger and Spencer being besotted and somewhat foolish was persuaded to sign his house and financial affairs over to Preece who never left her lover Hepworth. It is also thought that she had some leverage over Spencer and threatened to expose him and his erotic paintings unless he agreed to the financial terms. There was no acceptance in the 1930’s for such sexual works. Patricia eventually evicted Spencer from the house, and would not grant him a divorce, but continued to receive payments from him. After he was knighted in 1959, she insisted on being styled Lady Spencer and claimed a pension as his widow. Spencer’s fear of being exposed by Preece over his erotic paintings made him keep today’s painting under his bed where it remained until he died. Spencer lived to regret leaving his first wife and constantly wrote to her and occasionally visited her and their two children.
Sir Stanley Spencer died in 1959, aged 68. Hilda Carline died in 1950 aged 61. Patricia Preece died in 1966 aged 72. Wendy Hepworth died in 1978, aged 80.
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