SIR STANLEY SPENCER, R.A. | Baby in a High Chair

J.S. Birt and thence by descent to the present owner

Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery, summer 1972, cat. no.28 (details untraced);
Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery, on long-term loan, 1996-2018.

Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London, cat. no.313, illustrated p.473.

The canvas is original. It undulates very slightly in places, most visible in the right half of the canvas, but appears sound. There are light stretcher bar marks visible to the right edge and right of the lower edge. There are a couple of tiny pushes to the left of the canvas - to the upper left of the highchair and to the upper left of the baby's hair. There is very minor frame abrasion at intervals to the extreme edges. There is a tiny fleck of loss to the black counter container. There are some small accretions and some rubbing to the canvas where the vertical strip of canvas slip divides the left and right halves, and faint handling marks to the extreme right edge. There is minor surface dirt and studio matter in places. Subject to the above, the work appears in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is held behind glass in a gilt painted wooden frame with a canvas slip and a canvas slip divide between the oil to the left and right drawing to the right. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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We are grateful to Carolyn Leder for her kind assistance in the cataloguing of the present work.

Stanley Spencer’s appetite for painting the human figure was voracious. Obsessed with his work, he populated his paintings with fully fleshed-out characters supplied by a never-ending stream of family, friends and Cookham acquaintances. His work was but an extension of his life and thus the cast of characters was mined from his experiences. These familiar faces occupied scenes both prosaic and spiritual as the human figure became, for Spencer, a conduit between the earthly and divine, and Biblical stories played out in the streets and surrounding fields of his beloved Cookham. By the 1940s, Spencer’s work – and his unconventional life – was gaining increasing notoriety and, with this exposure, commissions followed, which kept Spencer and his family afloat during periods of financial difficulty. One such commission came in 1943 by the British and Northern Shipping Agency Ltd to honour Lars Larson, a founder of the company, with the aim of hanging the finished portrait in the boardroom; Portrait of Lars Larson, 1943, was sold in these rooms in 2003 for £308,000. A successful businessman, Lars Larson was a distinguished resident of Cookham and well-known personally to Spencer as he rented Lindworth, Spencer’s occasional home, during the War but permitted Spencer to continue his work in the garden studio. In turn, Larson’s son, J.S. Birt, commissioned the present work, a portrait of his baby son, George, that same year. In a pleasing symmetry befitting of Spencer's worldview, the portrait of the grandfather is just visible hanging on the wall behind his young grandson. In preparation for the commission, Spencer undertook at least two preparatory sketches and then a third on the canvas (seen on the right of the present work over an earlier sketch showing the beginnings of a garden landscape) with the oil painting itself to the left. Upon completion, however, Spencer did not cut the canvas thus leaving oil painting and pencil drawing side-by-side. Slight modifications can be gleaned from surveying the total canvas – to the right the toddler clutches a blanket and looks out whilst to the left he sits in a high chair with gaze cast down. Spencer studied at the Slade alongside the so-called ‘Crisis of Brilliance’ generation and, taught by the notorious Henry Tonks, he was instilled with the importance of honing his work in pencil, in the time-honoured tradition made famous by the previous Slade generation of Augustus John and William Orpen. Spencer’s draughtsmanship underscored his art – infinite gradations of shaded pencil translate into accumulations of touches of paint that result in a tessellated yet homogenous surface.

The oil painting to the left is a quintessential Spencer portrait. The flesh of the young child is beautifully realised with touches of blues, greens, pinks and reds coalescing. Clumps of golden locks curl across the toddler’s forehead, his eyes are framed with delicately delineated lashes and touches of white highlight his puckered bow lips. Spencer characterises the young boy with remarkable individuality and personality. He sits still for his portrait perhaps a little reluctantly, certainly slightly shyly - maybe even slightly petulantly having been disturbed from a game with his counters. As with the best of Spencer’s portraits from the 1940s and '50s, elements of exquisite still-lifes are scattered across the work from the portrait of Lars Larson and the hobby horse in the background to the multi-coloured counters and swirls of carpet in the foreground. As a continuation of Spencer’s attempt to paint the full gamut of human experience, Baby in a High Chair reveals a sensitive affinity with his young sitter.