I really enjoyed this book. This is a concise (about 120 pages of text) and well illustrated (about 100 images) introduction to the remarkable English painter Stanley Spencer. Robinson's text provides a useful biography of Spencer's career, a good idea of his rather unconventional ideas, and short accounts of how he fit into the artistic currents of his times. The selection of images is very good and illustrates well the range of Spencer's work and its evolution over his long and productive career.
Spencer is known best for his religious paintings, notably the powerful mural The Resurrection of the Soldiers in the Sandham Memorial Chapel. A man of deep and unconventional faith, Spencer produced a large number of canvases with religious themes, usually fusing the sacred and the quotidian. A native of the village of Cookham, where he spent much of his working life, the environs of his town were literally sacred ground to Spencer. This resulted in a very personal but surprisingly effective icongraphy.
What makes this book particularly enjoyable is the revelation of the range of Spencer's art. Spencer was also an outstanding landscape painter and a superb portraitist. This book reproduces a number of lovely landscape paintings. Some of the portraits reproduced, both drawings and paintings, are stunning.