View from Cookham Bridge by Stanley Spencer (1936) "In his blending of the transcendent and the mundane, Spencer was one of the most visionary British painters of the twentieth century." Stanley Spencer (1891 -1959) was born and raised in the village of Cookham by The River Thames in the county of Surrey. That village remained a key reference point for the rest of his life. It figured in much of his art and was his spiritual home. Furthermore, it is where he was buried along with his first wife Hilda. Stanley Spencer was an odd fish and in following his calling to be an artist, he did not play by anybody else's rules. He developed his own styles and pursued the themes that interested him - from Cookham to warfare to spirituality to shipyards to nudity to surrealism. In his private life, he was often tormented - mostly by his own inadequacies as he reached for a way of being that he hoped would rise above mundanity. Of course, this always eluded him. In World War ...