Thursday, April 8/2010

Train from Paddington to Cookham in the morning. We change at Maidenhead and are in luck, because a woman going to Marlowe to walk the Thames path to Henley tells us "platform four" and we follow her and make it with no more than a minute to spare - the next train on the Marlower branch line being an hour later. At Cookham the kind station master tells us how to reach the Stanley Spencer Gallery, a straightforward and pretty walk through the village. It's about ten minutes and the sun is warm on the cottages and the tiny moor we cross.

the gallery is in a house at the end of the high street, not large and surprisingly full of viewers. The price for concessions is £2, probably possible because the gallery, which gets no grants, is staffed by volunteers. It has a permanent collection of over 140 paintings but what is on view now is an exhibition commemorating the 60th anniversary of the death of Hilda, Spencer's first wife. Thus there are a number of paintings of Hilda and their two daughters as well as paintings done by Hilda and the younger daughter, Unity, both artists in their own right. The work is interesting, as is the biographical reminiscences on a video upstairs. There's even the original pram that Spencer used to wheel his painting materials, complete with the large sign asking that he not be distracted from his work.

What we don't see is very many of his fascinating religious paintings, such as the resurrection painting showing the people of Cookham rising from their graves in the village churchyard. There is a last supper as well as the enormous but unfinished painting of christ preaching at the Cooiham Regatta, but some of our favourites aren't here, either because the gallery doesn't own them or because they aren't included in the current exhibition.

It's sunny and warm and we walk down to the river, near where christ preached at the regatta in Spencer's last painting. Then along to the churchyard, where we sit on a bench and eat our bread and cheese and listen to the birds. Back on the high street past Spencer's old home and along to the Crown, a pub at the edge of the little common. We take our bitter to an outside table and watch the passers by.

There's a little more time and we go past the war monument down school lane, which is home to a marvellous old brick house with inset beams, so old that neither walls nor windows are straight. Round the corner there's a beautiful house with thatched roof and thatched porch cover. ~Then train back to Paddington.