“The Scarecrow, Cookham”, Stanley Spencer 1934, Private Collection.
Once seen, this painting will not be forgotten. I saw it years ago at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in his native Cookham. Recently, I read that when it was there, its postcard sold the most copies. I can remember buying one myself. But in the work of Spencer with his intense religious vision a scarecrow is more than it seems. In a very English setting, the scarecrow has its back to us so that the viewer and the subject look out over a field. There is a line of red bricked houses with woods behind but where are the crops and the crows? This is the garden of a house at Cookham. a village along the Thames in Berkshire where Stanley Spencer was born and where he spent most of his life. One day in 1934 he saw this scarecrow and set about painting it. In 1938 he would write that “It was like watching a person slowly changing into a part of nature. And I liked the feeling of it always being there… in the evening he faded away like a gleaming Cheshire cat”. This scarecrow has been made redundant. The broken down fence suggest that now this is a neglected corner of the garden. Sweet peas from flowerbeds have seeded themselves and are growing wild. There is an interchange between this man of straw and the Son of Man. In Spencer’s work this forgotten corner sings of Golgotha. The white sheet lying on the grass is surely the shroud. Someone lay upon it two inverted stands, each with its cruciform base, upon it. Perhaps it was to stop it being blown away, but it is also a reminder that there were three crosses erected that day, not just the one. The stick is lying also on top of the sheet, but visually it could be the spear piercing his side. The eye sees two triangles, one above and one below the outstretched arms, so that the form of the cross is all the more striking. The suggested distortion in the shoulder recalls Isaiah 52:54, “As many were astonished at him – his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.” In the hands of Spencer an old scarecrow has become the crucified Christ, still hanging in the abandoned corner of a garden. Spencer painted numerous scenes from the gospel, setting them in the world he knew and filling them with people who often look a bit ungainly but are astonishingly real. But here he records how an old scarecrow, abandoned in a corner of Cookham, was for him an epiphany.
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