Exhibition 'LOVE AND LANDSCAPE' in Stanley Spencer Gallery
The most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Stanley Spencer in a decade opened at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury in autumn 2025. The exhibition will travel to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, where it will be on display from 4 April to 1 November 2026. This leg of the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore Spencer’s deep emotional and artistic ties to Suffolk from the heart of his beloved Cookham. It reveals how Suffolk’s coastal landscape and Spencer’s complex relationships, particularly with Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece, shaped some of his most poignant and visionary paintings. Visitors will encounter rarely seen portraits, intimate drawings, and evocative scenes such as Southwold (1937), which reflect both joy and introspection.
The exhibition will also highlight Spencer’s imaginative project, ‘The Church House’, offering insight into how memory, love and place were interwoven in his spiritual and artistic vision.
This major exhibition curated in collaboration with Gainborough’s House will focus on the artist’s work in Suffolk, where he married Hilda Carline in 1925, and returned to a decade later.
