April beginnings: "so priketh hem Nature in hir coragis"*

"Sweet Thames run Softly",  Robert Gibbings wood engraving, 1940

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms.  Spring was moving in the air above  and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.  It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O Blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.  Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air.  So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again  and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

The Wind in the Willows,  Kenneth Grahame 1908

"The Wind in the Willows"     Paul Bransom

The first illustrations, by Paul Bransom, were not until the eighth edition in 1913, and many notable illustrators have followed, like Arthur Rackham and E. H. Shepard, but I have always read Kenneth Grahame's story of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad in a sibling's 1941 school edition with no pictures, just the excitement of Grahame's words.

As a child, when his mother died, Kenneth Grahame and his sister and brothers were sent to England  to live with their grandmother at The Mount, Cookham Dean, close to the Thames.  Here his uncle, the local curate, introduced him to boats and the river and later when Grahame lived further west at Blewbury with his family, the stories he wrote in The Wind in the Willows were those he had told to his young son Alastair.

  The gardens at The Mount,  Cookham Dean,  Stanley Spencer  1938 © artist's estate

Cookham Reach and Barley Hill,  Stanley Spencer c. 1920

Stanley Spencer grew up in Cookham itself and his paintings of the village and Cookham Lock have made the place famous.  Robert Gibbings was a friend from the Slade Art School, and in 1939 rowed along the Thames in his boat the "Willow" compiling his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.

*"Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages."  The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

Resurrection , imperfect

John Donne Arriving in Heaven   Stanley Spencer, 1911   Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Stanley Spencer was inspired to paint this by reading Donne's Sermons, a book given him by his friends and fellow students at the Slade, Jacques and Gwen (Darwin) Raverat.  "One had been brought up with the notion that heaven was, if not all enveloping, at least straight ahead.  In this picture [Stan] told me, he had the idea that heaven was to one side: walking along the road he turned his head and looked into Heaven,"  Gilbert Spencer.

Resurrection, imperfect

"Sleep sleep, old Sun, thou canst not have repast
As yet, the wound thou took'st on friday last;
Sleepe then, and rest; the world may beare thy stay,
A better Sun rose before thee to day,
Who, not content to'enlighten all that dwell
On the earths face, as thou, enlightned hell,
And made the darke fires languish in that vale,
As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale.
Whose body having walk'd on earth, and now
Hasting to Heaven, would, that he might allow
Himselfe unto all stations, and fill all,
For these three daies become a minerall;
Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous pietie
Thought, that a Soule one might discerne and see
Goe from a body, 'at this sepulchre been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soule,
If not of any man, yet of the whole."

Poems  John Donne, 1573-1631

Easter at Cookham

Christ Washing Peter's Feet  Stanley Spencer  1922 (John Ch. 13)

© Tullie House Museum, Carlisle

 The  Victorian balloon-backed dining chairs in this painting are from Spencer's home at Fernlea, Cookham, and the neighbours in the painting below are his sister Annie and their cousin next door.

Neighbours  Stanley Spencer 1936 

 Stanley Spencer Gallery, © estate of Stanley Spencer

 With best wishes for Easter to you all.

Young Giotto's pigs

" 'Nothing like pigs for significant form, Bob, '  interrupted a small man who had banged the door of an ancient car and come from the road to join us.  Though I did not recognise him at first, there was something familiar about the untidy twist of his necktie and the eager eyes that looked out from under two unkempt shocks of hair.  'Haven't seen you in twenty years,'  he said to me. 'Only heard last week that you were hereabouts.'

'Near fifty years since  the Slade,'  I said at a guess.
'More than forty, anyway,'  he said.

I knew who he was then -- Giotto Junior, as we used to call him because of his obsession with the early Florentine artists and because of the intensity of his own religious paintings.

'Pigs, I could draw them all day long,' he said, 'but they're awkward in a studio.'

Though I had followed his work through the years, I had never known him put pencil to pig.  Saints and angels and humans in mystic communion: allegories, they were his line, at times difficult to comprehend but always combining  a richness of form with minute and loving detail.

As he walked ahead of me towards the cottage I noticed that his shiny blue serge trousers had a slit across their seat, and through it was hanging a wide flap of linen shirt immaculately white.  I said nothing, but when two days later he paid his return visit I saw that the rent had been mended by a rectangular patch of mustard red tweed which spread from side to side of his behind.

'Why, Giotto,' I said, 'What's happened to you? You're all poshed up.'
'Oh yes, I know,'  he said wearily.  'But I'm going to a reception.'

Giotto was the master draughtsman among the students of our generation at the Slade.  Form and its interpretation obsessed him:...  Clean, cold, unrelenting drawing with a hard pencil was the order [at the Slade]:  no 'sketching,' none of the charcoal don't-give-yourself-away school: and Giotto, though physically the smallest student in the class, was with pencil in hand the biggest man among us."

Till I end my Song  Robert Gibbings

Reading at "Fernley", Cookham

"What he read, besides the Bible, was largely a closed book to me.  But conversation with my brother, Sydney, was one means of glimpsing his mind.  Another was to take a look at the old card table.  Occupying most of the space was the old Bible given to him by Mr Hatch, often opened at Job.  Struggling for space round its fringes would be Byron, Keats, Donne, Urn Burial, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Possessed.  He was heavily influenced by Dostoevski.  Later, referring to those days, he regretted struggling so long with Carlyle's French Revolution.

He was unorthodox in in the manner of his reading.  During his whole life, I never knew him sit in a comfortable chair, for this or any other purpose.  He was a hard-chair reader, and sat at a table more often than not, with his legs screwed round one another at the ankles; and a funny oil lamp usually provided the light."

Stanley Spencer by his brother Gilbert    Gilbert Spencer