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Dimensions: measurements 30 by 20 in. alternate measurements 76.2 by 50.8 cm
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Provenance: Miss Jean Shrimpton
Private Collection
with Agnews, London
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Exhibited:
London, Tate Britain; Ontario Art Gallery; Ulster Museum, Stanley Spencer , 2001-2002, no. 62
Kendal, Cumbria, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Stanley Spencer: Love, Desire, Faith , 2002, no. 20
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Literature: Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, London, 1992, p. 462, no. 274j, illustrated p. 461
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM AN ENGLISH PRIVATE COLLECTION
Spencer was a member of the Modern British artistic vanguard, constantly probing visual and thematic limits of convention. The period of the 1930's was one in which the artist experienced great emotional turmoil, giving birth to some of the most interesting and complex works in his oeuvre. Separated from his wife Hilda and subsequently abandoned by lover Patricia Preese, he moved from his earlier "Domestic scenes" toward a more overtly sexual visual content. Conceived and painted to form part of a series of eight paintings known as Beatitudes of Love, the present work is a visual meditation on the complex ideological ties between sexuality and religion. Infused with references to spiritual and physical exaltation, the work was to occupy one of eight loggias in the artist's "Church of Me", the architectural linchpin of his celebrated Church House project. Much like their religious counterparts, these small chapels were intended for private meditation and reflection. In this context, Sociableness was to inspire contemplation on the sanctity of marriage, sex and the unabashed physical expression of that union. In the artist's own words, "Behaving in this way would express to me a feeling of affability between husband and wife. Being naked in their own sitting room gives them the feeling that they are some kind of wild animal that has got into someone's sitting room..." (Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, London, 1992, p. 462) There is a profoundly Edenic quality to the composition. Both man and woman are physically and emotionally naked, on the precipice of sin at precisely the moment in which they fall from grace. The seven additional paintings that were to complement Sociableness also probed traditional notions of religious exaltation using physical pleasure as the thematic vehicle. They all consisted of portraits of couples in various intimate domestic settings. The artist unearths the profoundly Mystical undercurrents of the work in his commentary on the consistencies in the series: "Each of the pictures shows the twinned and unified souls of two persons. The composition turns the two into one person and becomes a single organism" (Maurice Collis, Stanley Spencer, London, 1962, p. 141).
