Sandham Memorial Chapel | |
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General information | |
Location | Burghclere, Hampshire, England |
Owner | National Trust |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Lionel Godfrey Pearson |
Website | |
www | |
Listed Building – Grade I | |
Official name | Sandham Memorial Chapel |
Designated | 18 May 1984 |
Reference no. | 1339741 |
Sandham Memorial Chapel is in the village of Burghclere, Hampshire, England. It is a Grade I listed, [1] 1920s decorated chapel, designed by Lionel Godfrey Pearson. The chapel was built to accommodate a series of paintings by the English artist Stanley Spencer. It was commissioned by Mary and John Louis Behrend (1881–1972) as a memorial to Mary's brother, Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham who died of illness contracted in Macedonia after the First World War. The chapel is surrounded by lawns and orchards, with views of Watership Down.
It is run by the National Trust and is open to the public. [2]
Spencer's series of seventeen paintings was inspired by his own experiences during the First World War, in which he served as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, first at Beaufort War Hospital in Bristol, and then on the Macedonian front, where he was subsequently transferred to the infantry. He was influenced by Giotto’s Arena Chapel murals in Padua. He wanted to paint frescoes too, but the environmental conditions were not appropriate. The subsequent paintings were commissioned in 1923, with Spencer moving to Burghclere in 1926 to work in situ. The series was completed in 1932. It is dominated by the Resurrection scene behind the altar, in which dozens of British soldiers lay the white wooden crosses that marked their graves at the feet of a distant Christ. The series chronicles Spencer's everyday experiences of the war rather than any scenes of action. When the art historian R. H. Wilenski saw the recently completed sequence, he wrote of his sense "that every one of the thousand memories recorded had been driven into the artist's consciousness like a sharp-pointed nail". [3]
The Chapel is consecrated as The Oratory of All Saints and only became officially recognised by its colloquial name Sandham Memorial Chapel following the National Trust's takeover of the property. Spencer would refer to it as his "Holy-Box", whilst the architect and patrons would privately refer to it as Spencer's "God-Box". Meanwhile, John and Mary Behrend's children pejoratively called it the "biscuit factory", in response to its "municipal" characteristics. [4]
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist. His Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War.
In art a predella is the lowest part of an altarpiece, sometimes forming a platform or step, and the painting or sculpture along it, at the bottom of an altarpiece, sometimes with a single much larger main scene above, but often, a polyptych or multipanel altarpiece. In late medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, where the main panel consisted of a scene with large figures, it was normal to include a predella below with a number of small-scale narrative paintings depicting events from the life of the dedicatee, whether the Life of Christ, the Life of the Virgin or a saint. Typically there would be three to five small scenes, in a horizontal format. Sometimes a single space shows different scenes in continuous representation.
Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War.
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Events from the year 1932 in art.
Events from the year 1927 in art.
Burghclere is a village and civil parish in Hampshire, England. According to the 2011 census the village had a population of 1,152. The village is near the border of Hampshire with Berkshire, four miles south of Newbury. It is also very close to Newtown and Old Burghclere.
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Beaufort War Hospital was a military hospital in Stapleton district, now Greater Fishponds, of Bristol during the First World War. Before the war, it was an asylum called the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, and after the war it became the psychiatric hospital called Glenside Hospital.
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