Gainsborough's Secret Tissot's Muse Victorian Values At The Piano Sale 6520, Lot 31 Sir Stanley Spencer, R.A. (1891-1959) At the Piano, 1957 Oil on canvas Estimate: £700,000-1,000,000 At The Piano Stanley Spencer's painting fuses childhood memories with a love from his later life. By Rachel Hidderley Stanley Spencer intended this extremely evocative picture to dominate the memorial to Daphne Charlton in his Church-House concept: a 'Chapel of Me'. Although never built, Church-House preoccupied Spencer after he painted the murals at the Chapel of All Souls, Burghclere. He envisaged a place of worship that would bring together the sacred and the domestic, reconciling his religious faith with his belief in the healing power of sexual love. The chapel would celebrate the most important women in his life: his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece; his lovers, Daphne Charlton and Charlotte Murray; and the family maid, Elsie Munday. The pictures for this series are necessarily extremely personal, usually celebrating a treasured memory, however mundane - visiting a wool shop in Stone-house with Daphne, picking cabbages during the war, or hanging washing out to dry. Spencer produced the original drawings for these paintings between 1939 and 1949 in four sketchbooks, copiously inscr1ibed with thoughts and ideas, many never realized as paintings. Many of the 'scrapbook' drawings celebrate Daphne and their relationship. The present work was painted in 1957 from a drawing conceived in 1941 at the height of Spencer's affair with Daphne, a woman who took pity on the disheveled and disillusioned artist after the breakdown of his second marriage and who lavished care and attention on him. Spencer believed her influence had restored both his self-esteem and his artistic vision. In it Daphne sits on the chaise longue knitting the wool they bought at the wool shop, while Spencer looks on in admiration. The presence of a piano in the room in the White Hart Hotel that they had shared during the war prompts Spencer to include Daphne in a scene that depicts a family celebration in the sitting room at his childhood home, with Spencer's piano teacher father, William, seated at the piano. The fusion of these separate events was acknowledged by Spencer in a letter to F.J. Lyons, who commissioned the work in November 1957. Rachel Hidderley is Head of the 20th Century British Art department, London. Inquiries: Jonathan Horwich Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2682 Back to top