Spencer’s tangled life

The fiery little man – he was 5ft 2in – found himself in emotional turmoil and heavily in debt in the mid to late 1930s thanks to his extravagant courtship of Patricia Preece while still married to Hilda Carline. Spencer wanted to keep both women but eventually he divorced Hilda after 11 years and wed Patricia in Maidenhead, Berkshire, on May 29, 1937.

The pair were to spend their honeymoon in St Ives. Patricia arrived a few days before Spencer, who was completing a painting in his birthplace of Cookham, Berkshire. But during that time the artist made love to his former wife, a fact he unwisely confessed to his new bride on arrival in Cornwall.

Patricia, somewhat to Spencer’s surprise, took the news badly, moved out of the master bedroom and, in all probability, never consummated the marriage. Spencer told a friend: “I’ve got two wives, one divorced and one not and I feel equally married to both of them.” Hilda died in 1950 but Spencer continued to write love letters to her for years afterwards.

I am reminded of the anecdote about one of the greatest English painters of the 20th century by the appearance of one of Spencer’s Yorkshire paintings in the Sotheby’s sale in London on June 15 and 16 of the extraordinary art collection built up by Wilfrid Evill and maintained by Honor Frost.

The 1928 oil, bearing the somewhat cumbersome title of Walls and Fields, Halifax (A Gate, Yorkshire), was almost certainly painted while he was staying with Hilda Carline’s brother George, who was at that time curator of the Bankfield Museum, Halifax, and the view is believed to be that from the garden gate of Carline’s house in the village of Warley on the outskirts of Halifax. Acquired by Wilfrid Evill for £35 in 1929, it is expected to realise up to £180,000.

At the same sale, Spencer’s 1949 Portrait of Hilda, the last before her death the following year, is estimated at £150,000 to £250,000. Art historians say that Spencer never stopped loving Hilda and she remained the most important figure in his life. The artist’s destructive passion for Patricia deeply hurt Hilda but she was able to see the better side of him, writing just before her death: “Being with Stanley is like being with a holy person, one who perceives.”

Spencer, one of 11 children, studied at the Slade and served as a hospital orderly with the Field Ambulance Service in Macedonia during the First World War – a daily witness to carnage and human suffering.

Also in the collection, Leeds-born Patrick Heron’s revolutionary figurative work The Blue Table with Window: 1954 is estimated to realise £250,000 to £350,000. Heron (1920-1999) worked as assistant to Bernard Leach in St Ives in the 1940s before moving to Cornwall and taking over Ben Nicholson’s studio in St Ives in 1958.