Stanley spencer biography kenneth poplar wood

With the attention given the First World War a century later, a look back at one of its greatest if most unpredictable artists, Stanley Spencer, rewards renewed examination.

Published in 1991 on the centenary of his birth, drawing on interviews with his two daughters, family and friends, and the Tate Gallery archived writings, Spencer in his first in-depth biography emerges not as the subject of dull critique, but of respect through a diligent effort by Kenneth Pople to let the artist's words speak for themselves.

They channel Spencer's interior struggle, evoked and expressed by slow craft or long difficulty. 

While very congenial towards Spencer, Pople provides a skilled interpretation of the rational and genesis for what can often be initially baffling or perplexing art.

Painstaking in his observations, he charts Spencer's professional and personal growth in chronological chapters documenting his self-awareness which emerges on canvas, as he sketched and painted from an ear