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Dimensions: 97.5 by 145cm., 38 1/2 by 57in.

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Provenance: PROPERTY OF BRONWEN, VISCOUNTESS ASTOR

Lord Astor, 1955 and by descent
on long term loan to the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham until October 2003

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Exhibited: London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Today and Yesterday, 1955, no.23;
London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1955, no.95;
London, Tate Gallery, Stanley Spencer, 1955, no.82;
Paris, Galerie Creuze, La Peinture Britannique Contemporaine, 1957, no.86;
Cookham Church and Vicarage, Stanley Spencer Exhibition,1958, no.untraced
London, Arts Council of Great Britain touring exhibition, Three Masters of Modern British Painting, 1961, no.39;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Stanley Spencer R.A., 1980, no.264, p.218, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (wherein dated 1953);
Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Images of Hilda, 1985, no.31.

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Literature: Studio, 147, 1954, pp.36-7;
Royal Academy Illustrated, 1955, illustrated p.17;
Modern Artist, vol. 1, no.2, 1955, pp.2-6;
Studio, 150, 1955, p.52;

John Rothenstein Modern English Painters, Vol.ii Lewis to Moore, Macdonald and Janes, London, 1956;
Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon, Oxford, 1979, pl.69 (image reversed);
Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Collins, London, 1991, pp.496-11, illustrated p.510
Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London, cat.no.401, illustrated p.225

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Notes: Almost immediately after her death in 1950, Spencer wrote to his late wife Hilda (in the remarkable correspondence that continued until his own death) to tell her he was now taking up the long considered subject of Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Drawing upon his memories of the annual Cookham Regatta before the Great War, he envisaged Christ, accompanied by his disciples, visiting his beloved village to preach from the horse-ferry barge moored by Cookham Bridge, just as his brother Will and others had entertained the villagers with a concert after the Regatta. This enormous work, seventeen feet long, rivalling in breadth and imagination the great Resurrection of Cookham of 1924-6 (coll.Tate Gallery, London), was to be the altarpiece in the 'river aisle' of his projected Church House decorations surrounded by a predella of smaller paintings (see fig.1, overleaf). In 1952-3 he produced no less than sixty chalk drawings for the composition; but he could not bring it to completion before his death in 1959. The large canvas hangs unfinished in the Stanley Spencer Gallery at Cookham (private collection); he did however complete six of the smaller works of which Listening from Punts is the third. Bought by Lord Astor who also commissioned a portrait from Spencer in 1956 and became a friend and supporter of Spencer at the end of his life, it has never previously appeared at auction.

Listening from Punts was finished in 1954. As with the others works of the series the impact it exerts as an individual composition makes it hard to envisage how Spencer intended it to fit into the painting cycles at the Church House. In practise, like Leger, for example, he imagined an architectural ensemble but realised the ideas as easel paintings. The success of these was evident when Dudley Tooth sold the smaller Regatta scenes almost immediately they were painted. Their 'loss' to the artist may explain the fact a replica of image of Listening from Punts appears drawn in the unfinished top left corner of Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Keith Bell points out that Spencer clearly planned '...to preserve the most important ideas of the scheme in one indivisible work, whose statement would be as complete as that summation of his early career, The Resurrection, Cookham.' (see Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London, 1992, p.225)

Mapping his compositions with under drawing and squaring was an integral part of Spencers' method. The lines remain clearly visible in Listening from Punts as in most of the later work and in the other five canvases from the series. Jane Alison writes eloquently about Spencer's design in relation to another unfinished composition, The Apotheosis of Hilda:-

'The pace and quality of Spencer's drawing changes as it traverses the enormous canvas; sometimes slightly awkward, marking out a shape for the painting, elsewhere it is fluid and adroit. The web of grey pencil line over such an expanse of primed canvas is itself a pleasure.' (see introduction to Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love, catalogue to exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London 1991 p.23). Timothy Hyman expands on his painting method 'Starting usually from the top left-hand corner, he would complete each small section separately rather like a fresco painter. But fresco is a bold swift medium. Spencer in his mural-size Regatta crawls tiny brushes across an impoverished surface, devoid of touch or impasto, silting it up in what the late John Boulton-Smith called his 'boiled-sweet' colours' (ibid., p.32)

Boiled sweet colours are in fact brilliantly evocative of an event which was the festive highlight of the year at Cookham and a magical one for Spencer, when punts were an unattainable luxury but concerts and watching from the bridge was not. They are the colours of the Edwardian clothes of the onlookers (particularly the 'toffs' from London) the chintz on the punt cushions and the light of the Chinese lanterns. They serve to emphasise joyousness and nostalgia which Spencer imagined as the perfect setting for the Last Day and the celebrations surrounding the Resurrection.

It is true to say however that in a great deal of his later work Spencer displays little interest in the application and surface of paint. It appears to have been for him almost an irrelevance in the context of the ideas that tumbled ceaselessly from his imagination. Listening from Punts does retain an impasto in Spencer's rendering of the water surrounding the punts which disappears from the very last works. More emphatically he found expression in composition and in the gestures of his figures, and in this his inventiveness is unsurpassed. 'Central to Spencer's late achievement is this ability to explore the potentialities of the body, and its gestures, as an expression of intense emotion or psychological states-to imbue the body with tension or pleasure or both.' (ibid. pp.15-16) In the present picture the middle ground has for example, two small figures whose arms appear to wrap several times around their bodies, hugging themselves with excitement. Directly in front of them a woman in red has collapsed, her arm hanging into the next punt. Spencer told Geoffrey Robinson that she was 'a fallen woman unmasked by her companions and brought before Christ for judgement.' This kind of expression manifests itself most emphatically in the main female figure dressed in white summer dress holding a bouquet. She is being supported by the woman to her left who is necessary, as Spencer told his daughters, to prevent her from becoming so overwhelmed by Christ's teaching that she would faint with joy.

This central figure is clearly Hilda, her hat is an adaptation of the tricorn Hilda wore on their wedding day in 1925, now fashioned by Spencer into a heart. At her feet lies the coat worn by her on the same day. Her presence here reacting to the sermon immediately distinguishes the present picture from others in the Regatta series. Punts Meeting; Girls Listening; Conversation between Punts; Punts by the River (all private collection); Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (coll Tate Gallery), remarkable in other ways, are peopled by villagers who appear to have a marked lack of interest in Christ's message.

It is fitting that Hilda should be the main identifiable character in Spencer's last great cycle of paintings. Here four years after her death (and for the rest of his life) she is still central to Spencer's thought. As Jane Alison expresses (ibid.p.19) 'The love of Hilda, a consuming passion... is at the core of Spencer's whole philosophy. Through a sublime earthly love Spencer was united with the world and with God -'My union with you is my union with the world'. It is almost as though his love of Hilda was the one essential ingredient that bound everything together, affirming his existence and his art.'