The Ministers, Ming Tombs, Peking

Location

Country: China
City: Beijing
Place: British Embassy

Famous for his landscapes of Cookham, Sir Stanley Spencer is one of Britain’s most popular figurative painters of the 20th century. He enrolled at the Slade School in 1908, gaining a scholarship and other awards that cemented his reputation as a brilliant student. In 1915 he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was sent to Macedonia with an ambulance brigade. His war-time experiences formed the basis for his decoration of the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Berkshire. In 1925 Spencer married Hilda Carline and the couple had a son and a daughter. During the Second World War he was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to paint monumental canvases of Lithgow’s shipyards at Port Glasgow, now in the Imperial War Museum, London. After the War he returned to Cookham, where he died in 1959 The art world ‘rediscovered’ Spencer’s work in the 1980s most notably after large exhibitions of his work were held at the Royal Academy in 1980 and Tate Britain in 2001.

Places

Far East, China, Ming Dynasty Tombs, Beijing

Subjects

statue (as Subject), topography, landscape C20th, hill, road, tomb/sepulchre/mausoleum, pagoda

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Sir Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959)

Title

The Ministers, Ming Tombs, Peking

Date

1954

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 42.40 cm, width: 54.10 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Christie's, 6 June 2008

Inscription

none

Provenance

Arthur Tooth and Sons, London; J L Behrend 1954; [private collection?); Christie's, 6 June 2008 (lot 94)

GAC number

18193