Stanley Spencer's The Betrayal

Stanley Spencer, The Betrayal (1922-23), oil on canvas, Ulster Museum, Belfast

The thing I most like about Stanley Spencer (1891-1955) is the eccentric way in which he visualises scenes from the Bible as if they occurred in his hometown of Cookham in Berkshire. Many renaissance artists would do something similar of course. Fra Angelico’s Annunciation for example, seems to take place within the cloistered architecture of an Italian monastery and Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi is set in the ruins of what could be classical Rome. Its easy to see how this makes bible stories relatable to the audience of the time. But with Spencer, it always feels more Britishly idiosyncratic.

The Betrayal reimagines the nighttime episode from Christ’s Passion where Peter draws his sword to cut off the ear of a soldier, Malchus, a servant of the High Priest Caiaphas, and one of those sent to arrest Jesus after Judas gave him away by leading the party to the garden of Gethsemane. According to the gospels, Peter had been praying there with Jesus and tried to defend him, but Jesus told him to put away his sword. After the arrest, Peter would go on to deny knowing Jesus, another kind of betrayal.

In the painting, Gethsemane has become the rear of the school room in Cookham, near to the family home and a boyish Stanley is shown on the right together with his brother Gilbert skulking fearfully against a corrugated iron wall and witnessing the scene, partly obscured by the leafy branch of a tree. According to Spencer’s own account, this they felt was a particularly sinister spot where rubbish would often be left. Behind a brick wall, some of Jesus’s disciples are also looking on, but they seem somewhat disengaged from the drama being played out in front of and below them and are shown as mostly leaning forward as if anxious to move on, to dissociate themselves from the action; only a few of them seem disquieted by what they are witnessing. They are made to look like a line of fainthearted followers rather than committed supporters; their pusillanimity is as blameworthy as Judas’ direct betrayal in Spencer’s envisioning. They stand in remarkably close proximity to one another, and this, together with the tight spaces between buildings and the narrowness of the passageway that the principal figures occupy, lends emphasis to a sense of tense and claustrophobic confinement to the event.

This betrayal happens in an up-close-and-personal kind of way; it is unsettling for its sense of personal space violation as it is for its depiction of what today we would call knife crime in a sleepy Berkshire village. Peter’s cloak has flared up with the sudden movement of his arm about to strike, while an oddly rotund and wide-eyed Jesus stands in the gateway, a symbolically liminal positioning, which may be a comment on the consequences of this pivotal moment. That cloak flaring means that Peter’s face is partly obscured, and the almost perfectly circular shape that the cloth describes becomes the focal point of the painting – it’s a depiction of one of those accidental and momentary effects that are almost comical, the inflation of the material gesturing the reckless impulsiveness of the sword brandishing which will soon be deflated thanks to Christ’s composure.

Given the gravity of the central event of the painting, it is interesting that Spencer devotes just as much meticulous care and attention to the depiction of the built environment of its Cookham setting as he does to the action. Each brick in the wall and in the dwellings in the background has been precisely delineated, as have the tiled roofs. The unseen light source, which could be the moon or a streetlamp (or possibly the lights of nearby Maidenhead according to one account), illuminates the scene theatrically but its brightness makes possible this detailed verisimilitude and also means that the foreground is cast into deep shadow to the extent that it is difficult to make out what the figure on the ground is doing. Cookham, Spencer seems to suggest, is a perfectly appropriate place for the drama of the Passion, the narrative of the final days of Jesus’ life on earth, to be played out. In other words, he sanctifies his birthplace, the place with which he was most familiar and most at home. It makes me picture a scenario where a critic might have questioned Spencer as to why this episode should occur in a small English village and I imagine him answering ‘why ever not?’, as if it is the most natural of occurrences.

The composition comprises several contrasting geometric shapes: the rectilinear brick walls, the main one of which is inset with sections of randomised knapped flint, provide the perspectival depth of field while the pitched roofs of the village buildings abound with tetrahedral forms, albeit the main one with the open window is softened by the gentle and homely curve to its eaves. The foliage, the figures and their clothing provide the only organic form relief from these strong shapes. Along with this physical manifestation, Spencer also conceptualises contrasting yet complimentary realms of time, place, existence, emotion and experience:  the biblical and the local, the transcendent and the everyday, the past and the present, and affectively the volatile and the self-assured.

All of this speaks to Spencer’s sense of the fundamental believability of the Christian narrative. In one of his best-known paintings, The Resurrection, Cookham, the afterlife is not pictured as some mystical notion of a heavenly assembly of disembodied souls but is shown more literally.

Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London

This is the kingdom of God but it’s a Cookhamised version of it, and includes depictions of various family and friends within it. Perhaps we have all seen too many zombie-apocalyse movies for us to see this image today as quite the scene of joyous tranquilty and exaltation that the artist intended, but it does neverthless, speak of the legitimacy of a parochial  vision of immortality; just as Jesus himself was mysteriously both divine and human, so this revelation of heaven might just as plausibly be celestial and also unquestionably and simultaneosuly, English. Indeed, there is a cinematic quality to this work and not just thanks to its ciemascope scale and dimensions. This is a resurrection in which figures who are acting out various storylines are reborn to more fully appreciate the lives they have led and importantly, the beauty and joy of their parish. I like so much of the detail in this painting; just one small example, the figure on the left popping up from his grave to smell a flower, as if made aware of its delightful fragrance for the first time.

Spencer mapped his Christian beliefs onto the topography of his neighbourhood and in both The Betrayal and The Resurrection, Cookham, as well as in many other works of the period, he conjured his life and the lives of his fellow parishioners as if they had undergone a transfiguration to emerge into a new world that was the same as the here and now but one in which God had made himself known. Why couldn’t this be Cookham or anywhere else for that matter?