Gilbert Spencer was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet his fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.

Gilbert was born at Cookham in Berkshire, the youngest of eleven children of William Spencer, an organist and music teacher, and Anna Caroline Slack and later studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art, before enrolling at the Slade School. Like many artists of this period, Spencer was taught by Henry Tonks, the surgeon turned artist, who depicted facially disfigured soldiers of the First World War waiting to undergo reconstructive surgery.

Gilbert attended the Slade between 1913 and May 1915, winning the life-drawing prize in 1914 and coming second in the summer competition with his mural titled The Seven Ages of Man [now at the Hamilton Art Gallery, Canada].

This being war-time, nearly every day new facts would have risen round Gilbert, the whole system of London social life had undergone a change almost as complete as if Londoners were thrust back to the London of two hundred years before. The darkness at night which kept people indoors, the severe liquor restrictions which drastically altered social habits, the disappearance of cheap railway tickets and the reduction of the trains which cut him off from Cookham, the shortening of holidays, the disappearance of his brothers and many of his friends into the army and the consequent and constant re-working of businesses (including art schools) with fewer men and women to run them and fewer men and women to benefit from them.

Gilbert left Cookham and travelled to Bristol to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps; after basic training, he took a train to Southampton to board HMS Gloucester Castle. He served throughout the war in Salonika and Egypt. In 1919, he made his way back to Berkshire and then to the Slade.

‘*New Arrivals: F4 Ward, No. 36 Stationary Hospital, Mahemdia, Sinai.’* (c1918)

Recovering from their war service, Gilbert (and Stanley) accepted an invitation from the artist Henry Lamb in summer 1920 to join him on a painting trip to Dorset. With Lamb then living in the village of Stourpaine, the brothers stayed a mile or so across the valley of the Stour at Durweston. Despite their forays into the Berkshire landscape before the war, this was their first opportunity to paint for a sustained period directly from nature, and each day the three worked alongside each other, where a spirit of fraternal rivalry prevailed.

Although subsequently Stanley summarily dismissed his outdoor paintings – ‘I hated doing landscapes’ he wrote to his future wife Hilda Carline in July 1923 – Gilbert sensed that here, on the gentle wooded slopes of the Stour, he had found his element. He felt a natural affinity to the open views, the variegated colours and subtle textures of the Dorset landscape, and the idyllic scenery would draw him back summer after summer for decades.

In 1922, the artist Sydney Carline, a student friend of Gilbert from the Slade and who had taken up the post of Ruskin, Master of Drawing at the University of Oxford, invited Gilbert to join his staff. It was during his time in Oxfordshire that Gilbert became friends with the society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell who lived at Garsington Manor. Garsington's guests (some lingered for months, and even years, at Ottoline's expense) included T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence who imagined Garsington as ‘being like the Boccaccio place where they told all the Decamerone,’ and fell in love with the house and its gardens. ‘My God it breaks my soul,’ he wrote to Cynthia Asquith from Garsington, ‘this England, these shafted windows, the elm trees, the blue distance ... ‘

Gilbert’s time in Oxfordshire nurtured an air of experimentation, gone were the dense tonalities, the muddy browns and ochres that characterised the impasto surfaces and forceful brushwork of his early Dorset work. Here his paintings took on a lighter touch, the paint applied more thinly. Now in his mid-thirties, Gilbert had hit his stride: he had found his creative voice.

After a period in Abingdon in Oxfordshire he moved to Hampstead in London at the invitation of Sydney Carline and began living with the artistic Carline family at their house on Devonshire Hill. In 1930, Gilbert was appointed to the staff of the Royal College of Art by William Rothenstein. Later that year he would marry Ursula Bradshaw on December 31 1930 with the artist John Nash as best man.

Soon after their marriage the Spencer’s lived at Burdens Farm House, near Compton Abbas, Dorset and would remain there on and off until 1936. He later commented, 'We loved the place on sight, and took it from the farmer, Ivor Day for 10 shillings a week, plus rates' (see G. Spencer, Gilbert Spencer, R.A. Memoirs of a Painter, London, 1974, p. 116). He painted many fine works of the Dorset landscape including this lovely, previously ‘lost,’ oil painting, ‘Melbury Downs,‘ (c1934) which I re-discovered in 2023 and which is now for sale. The picture was most likely exhibited at the Goupil Gallery Winter Salon 1934 and the NEAC Winter Salon 1935 (number 225).

Between 1936 and 1970 Gilbert worked at Tree Cottage in Upper Basildon, Berkshire. He usually worked outdoors but in winter would paint from his cottage windows or in what he called his ‘little Colt studio’ in the garden. In his memoirs, he wrote that when he entered the studio ‘I hated it so much that I knocked it about, and messed it up to get it more in sympathy with my feelings for painting in odd corners, or bedrooms, indoors.’

Like Stanley, Gilbert served as an official war artist from 1940 to 1943. Between 1948 and 1950, he was the head of department of painting and drawing at the Glasgow School of Art and in 1950 was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. The year that he was made a Royal Academician, in 1959, both Ursula and his brother Stanley died.

Retrospective exhibitions of Gilbert’s work took place in 1964 at Reading Art Gallery and 1974 at the Fine Art Society in London. In 1970, at the age of seventy-eight, Gilbert moved to a farm cottage in Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk where he spent the remainder of his life. He died in 1979. Gilbert Spencer’s work is in several public collections including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Imperial War Museum, Manchester City Galleries, Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield and Belfast City Art Gallery.

The first biography charting Gilbert’s life and career was published by Yale University Press in 2024. Written by Paul Gough with contributions by Amanda Bradley Petitgas and Sacha Llewellyn, the book shines a new light on Gilbert’s work and rightly marks him out as one of the most significant British painters of the last century.

My grateful thanks to Dr Amy Lim for helping me to catalogue ‘Melbury Downs.’

Further art work by Gilbert Spencer can be found at Art UK. https://artuk.org/discover/artists/spencer-gilbert-18921979

Gilbert Spencer: a very English eye for landscape

Walter Sickert, Degas, Dieppe, and the Monet factor

Claud Lovat Fraser; an unsung hero of British design