Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham, painted between 1924 and 1927 and now in Tate Britain, is the most audacious visualization of Christian resurrection in twentieth-century painting and one of the most original works of British art. The large canvas - 274 by 549 centimeters - imagines the general resurrection of the dead taking place in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, Berkshire, Spencer's native village, with identifiable local people, members of Spencer's own family, and figures drawn from his friendships and loves clambering out of their graves in Sunday best, stretching in the morning light, embracing, looking about them with the slightly dazed expression of people who have been asleep for a very long time.
The biblical basis is 1 Corinthians 15:52 - 'in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed' - and John 5:28-29 - 'a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out - those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.' Spencer painted neither the trumpet nor the judgment but the middle moment: the rising itself, the emergence from the ground, the first bewildered moments of a new existence in a familiar place.
The choice to set the resurrection in Cookham was not whimsy but theological conviction. Spencer described Cookham in his writings as 'a holy suburb of heaven' - a place where the sacred was permanently available in the ordinary, where the walls between the visible and invisible worlds were thinner than elsewhere. His theology, which borrowed freely from Anglican Incarnationalism, William Blake, and his own mystical experience, was centered on the conviction that the divine does not require transportation away from the particular and local but is most fully encountered there. If Christ became incarnate in a specific human body in a specific place, then the resurrection will happen in specific human bodies in specific places, and the most theologically honest way to paint the resurrection is to paint it happening in the most specific place the painter knows.
The churchyard of Holy Trinity Cookham is exactly as Spencer painted it: the ancient yew tree, the church porch, the path between the graves. God the Father appears in the church porch, surrounded by figures, blessing the newly risen. Christ appears in a second register of the painting, receiving souls aboard what appears to be a riverboat - combining the Thames imagery central to all of Spencer's Cookham paintings with the traditional image of the soul's post-mortem journey. Revelation 20:13 - 'the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them' - is recalled by the water imagery.
Spencer included himself and his first wife Hilda in the painting (Hilda is the figure in the foreground center, rising from a grave, her face turned toward the viewer), and the painting's biographical dimension is as important as its theological one. Spencer and Hilda's marriage was complex and ultimately failed, but Spencer maintained a form of mystical relationship with her even after their divorce and after her death. The Resurrection, Cookham is in part a painting about the conviction that love, like resurrection, is not terminated by death.
The painting was first exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1927 and was immediately recognized as an extraordinary achievement. The Times critic wrote that it was 'the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century.' The Tate acquired it, and it has been on continuous public display in various Tate venues since.
The Tate Britain building in London holds the painting, usually in the British art galleries. It is accompanied by other Spencer works that allow comparison of his Cookham theology across his career. The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham also holds important related works and documentation.
For further reading: Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (1992); Timothy Hyman, Stanley Spencer (2001); Andrew Causey, ed., Stanley Spencer (1980); Carolyn Leder, Stanley Spencer: The Astor Collection (1976); Paul Gough, Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere (2006).