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Lot Essay
Painted in 1936, Corner in the garden was executed during a period when Spencer, with the encouragement of his dealer, Dudley Tooth, was concentrating on landscape and still-life oil painting depicting Cookham and the surrounding area. Although landscape painting had always featured in Spencer's oeuvre, when, in October 1932, he transferred to Arthur Tooth and Sons in Bruton Street from Goupil's, the agreement specified that Tooth would continue to market the commercially more difficult figure paintings in return for a steady flow of saleable landscape paintings.
Although Spencer was enjoying considerable success, having purchased 'Lindworth', his Cookham residence from 1932, with the proceeds of the sale of The Resurrection 1924-27, (Tate Britain, London), his relationship with Patricia Preece was placing an increasing strain on his finances and the importance of producing landscape and still-life paintings became greater.
Cookham, which is the setting for many of these works, was for Spencer 'a holy suburb of heaven'. In them, Spencer dispensed with preliminary drawings and painted directly from nature, producing a feeling of an intensely observed moment. Corner in the garden demonstrates an important development in the compositional structure of these paintings as the focus has narrowed down, and the sweeping landscape vistas, typical of the 1920s, have been replaced with the detailed description of a few spring flowers; hyacinth, daffodils and Japanese quince.
In this work, Spencer has chosen to depict an area of a garden, perhaps not always noticed. Through this act of concentration and replication of the three different flowering plants together, which appear as if they are a pre-arranged still-life, Spencer conveys the accidental beauty inherent in nature. Other paintings which similarly demonstrate the almost photographic realism, resulting from Spencer's absorption in his subject, in which landscape and still life painting are fused together, include Gypsophila, circa 1934, (private collection), sold Christie's, London, 7 March 1991, lot 55 for £83,600, and The Greenhouse, 1938, (private collection), sold Christies, London, 24 November 2000, lot 32 for £141,250.
Keith Bell notes the appeal of these paintings was rooted, 'in the growing idealization of the countryside ... which found expression in the 'back to the land' movement after the First World War, and which was supported by books like Longman's English Heritage series in 1929, the programmes produced by the BBC on the 'national character'' (loc. cit.), and contemporary critics responded enthusiastically to the paintings shown at Tooths. A commentator in the Scotsman observed, 'Personally I think Spencer is in the tradition of British Pre-Raphaelitism ... the poetic naturalistic kind of Hunt, Brown and the young Millais. Spencer paints landscape as they did, not so minutely of course, but with the same prodigious delight in all the facts of nature for their own sake. He loves to paint nettles and grasses leaf by leaf, blade by blade, as they did. He loves it all too much to leave anything out' (ibid.).
Although Spencer was enjoying considerable success, having purchased 'Lindworth', his Cookham residence from 1932, with the proceeds of the sale of The Resurrection 1924-27, (Tate Britain, London), his relationship with Patricia Preece was placing an increasing strain on his finances and the importance of producing landscape and still-life paintings became greater.
Cookham, which is the setting for many of these works, was for Spencer 'a holy suburb of heaven'. In them, Spencer dispensed with preliminary drawings and painted directly from nature, producing a feeling of an intensely observed moment. Corner in the garden demonstrates an important development in the compositional structure of these paintings as the focus has narrowed down, and the sweeping landscape vistas, typical of the 1920s, have been replaced with the detailed description of a few spring flowers; hyacinth, daffodils and Japanese quince.
In this work, Spencer has chosen to depict an area of a garden, perhaps not always noticed. Through this act of concentration and replication of the three different flowering plants together, which appear as if they are a pre-arranged still-life, Spencer conveys the accidental beauty inherent in nature. Other paintings which similarly demonstrate the almost photographic realism, resulting from Spencer's absorption in his subject, in which landscape and still life painting are fused together, include Gypsophila, circa 1934, (private collection), sold Christie's, London, 7 March 1991, lot 55 for £83,600, and The Greenhouse, 1938, (private collection), sold Christies, London, 24 November 2000, lot 32 for £141,250.
Keith Bell notes the appeal of these paintings was rooted, 'in the growing idealization of the countryside ... which found expression in the 'back to the land' movement after the First World War, and which was supported by books like Longman's English Heritage series in 1929, the programmes produced by the BBC on the 'national character'' (loc. cit.), and contemporary critics responded enthusiastically to the paintings shown at Tooths. A commentator in the Scotsman observed, 'Personally I think Spencer is in the tradition of British Pre-Raphaelitism ... the poetic naturalistic kind of Hunt, Brown and the young Millais. Spencer paints landscape as they did, not so minutely of course, but with the same prodigious delight in all the facts of nature for their own sake. He loves to paint nettles and grasses leaf by leaf, blade by blade, as they did. He loves it all too much to leave anything out' (ibid.).