Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist
Paul Gough (Yale, £30)
WHEN Reading Museum and Art Gallery mounted a Gilbert Spencer retrospective in 1964, the artist ensured that one of the model farm carts he had been making since boyhood was a centrepiece exhibit. It reflected his love of agricultural subjects and the care he took over accurate depiction. His most famous work, A Cotswold Farm (1930–31), in which two carts pulled by Shire horses seem to collide, features a hulking West Country ‘ship’ wagon, bright blue with big red wheels. ‘Gilbert knew every detail and nuance of these massive machines,’ writes Paul Gough. The cart might also symbolise the dividing line with his brother, Stanley. As the earthier, more gregarious Gilbert once said about his mystical sibling: ‘He inhabits a world which people do not know … [whereas] I am homespun.’
The last solo exhibition on Gilbert was in 1974—this is, published at about the same time, five years before his death, aged 86, in 1979. Yet, for those who enjoy Home Counties art, he ought to be on the radar. Overall, Gilbert was a likeable personality, with such enthusiasm for his calling that he was still, in his own words, running down the path to his studio into his mid seventies. Although there is no attempt here to argue that he was an overlooked genius, it does put him in his rightful place as one of several 20th-century British countryside artists whose outwardly conservative paintings do not entirely mask anxiety about the changing face of farming and rural life (such as and ).
