Love and Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk

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The most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) in a decade transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham from 4 April 2026, following a highly successful run at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury.

Held in partnership between the two museums, the exhibition will feature major loans from Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, and other public lenders, as well as rarely seen works from private collections, presented alongside important works from the collection of the Stanley Spencer Gallery. This second leg of the exhibition will enable visitors to explore Spencer’s emotional connection with the county of Suffolk in the heart of the village – Cookham – that first gave rise to his deep sense of place.

Although Spencer’s life and career are largely synonymous with his native village of Cookham in Berkshire, he also spent a great deal of time in Suffolk, most notably Wangford and Southwold on the coast. His association with the county spanned four decades, initially through the experience of his first wife, Hilda Carline (1889-1950). A talented painter in her own right, Hilda had worked as a Land Girl in Wangford during the First World War, and in 1924 Spencer, Hilda and other members of her family stayed there for a painting holiday. The Carline family of artists also played host to a regular gathering of artists at their home in Hampstead, London, and Richard Carline’s (1896-1980) enormous group portrait, Gathering on the Terrace (1924), depicts various members of the group.

A year later, Stanley and Hilda returned to Wangford to be married, and they visited again in 1926. For a man whose art was deeply informed by memories of people and places, it was their time in Suffolk that laid down happy associations for him, and paintings such as Trees and Chicken Coops (1925-26) and The Red House, Wangford (1926) reveal his connection with the life and landscape of the area.

In the early 1930s, things began to fall apart for the couple. Stanley became enraptured with a younger artist, Patricia Preece (1894-1966), apparently oblivious to her romantic and artistic partnership with Dorothy Hepworth (1894-1978). Divorce from Hilda was swiftly followed by marriage to Patricia, followed equally swiftly by the irretrievable breakdown of this second marriage. This juncture of his life, with its complicated domestic environment, is reflected with a group of works of and by Hilda, Patricia and Dorothy. These include Spencer’s striking and intimate Nude portrait of Patricia Preece (1935).

Seeking comfort and solace by returning to the source of his earlier happiness, Spencer once again travelled to the Suffolk coast, revisiting familiar landmarks. He wrote movingly of being able to reestablish a connection with the landscape after his domestic difficulties. It was on this visit that Spencer produced one of his most popular paintings, Southwold (1937). The striped deckchairs, relaxing figures, and bright sunlight shining on the surface of the beach and waves, look full of joy, but closer inspection suggests that the viewer – or indeed Spencer – is distant, removed, and reflecting on what might have been.

The exhibition also explores the Church-House, a vast but unrealised project that dominated Spencer’s imagination in his final decades. Featuring paintings from the collection of the Stanley Spencer Gallery, it reveals how Spencer’s extraordinary creative imagination was shaped by his life and loves, in particular his love for Hilda and his idealisation of marriage, despite the failure of his own marriages.

Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk has been generously supported by the artist’s family with the loan of personal items that have never been previously displayed, including Hilda Carline’s affectionate portrait of their daughter Unity, new to the exhibition in Cookham. Also newly on display is an extraordinary letter written on wallpaper by Stanley to Hilda after their breakdown of their marriage, expressing his enduring love and desire for her.