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Trinity Festival - Visit to Sandham Memorial Chapel

(27 April 2003)

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On Tuesday 26th April, the Spencer Gallery organised a trip to the Sandham Memorial Chapel near Newbury.  The red-brick chapel was built in the 1920s to house paintings by Stanley Spencer, inspired by his experiences in the First World War, the chapel contains war scenes in Salonica which cover the chapel walls. Influenced by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, Spencer took five years to complete what is arguably his finest achievement. Click here to see Convoy of Wounded Soldiers one of the paintings in the chapel.

The Chapel was completed in l927, and contains the cycle of l9 major paintings as a war memorial to H W Sandham who lost his life following the Macedonian campaign in l919. Spencer himself had served there and in Kosovo in the Royal Army Medical Corps (where he had been placed on account of his diminutive size). Spencer has conveyed something of that region’s overbearing religious attitude, through personal experience, in these remarkable works. 

In spite of the rain, the Cookham visitors were able to enjoy this remarkable building with the awe inspiring works of Spencer to the full.

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