1 Painting, The art of War, Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, with footnotes

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959)

Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, c. 1919

Oil on canvas

H 182.8 x W 218.4 cm

IWM (Imperial War Museums)

Spencer was commissioned to create this painting in April 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee. In his owns words Spencer wanted to show ‘God in the bare real things, in a limber wagon, in ravines, in fouling mule lines.’ Of those he depicts he said ‘during these nights the wounded passed through the dressing stations in a never ending stream.’ More on this painting

Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War.

As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Spencer's works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. More on Stanley Spencer

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