How different life would have been for Stanley Spencer had he not been born in the tiny Berkshire village of Cookham. It was there that Spencer, often described as the epitome of the middle-class village eccentric, found love and inspiration in the ordinariness of the High Street, churchyard and people who walked its narrow lanes.
Spencer was the eighth child of respectable parents who taught him to play Bach on the piano - his father, William Spencer, was a church organist - and created a rural idyll at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In 1912, Spencer went to the Slade School of Art in London, where his contemporaries, people such as Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg, called him "Cookham". Such was Spencer's passion for his birthplace that each morning he would take a Great Western train from the village to the Slade and after class he would take a train back again, arriving home just in time for tea.
At a time when many painters rejected religious imagery, Spencer embraced it. He was influenced by the style of Giotto and the Pre-Raphaelites, while his fellow students turned to Modernism and the dark brooding strength of the machine. A favourite method of expressing the spirituality he saw around him was to include Cookham scenes in his paintings. In Cookham he saw a "village in heaven", a place where religious events occurred. His large Nativity painting, which won the Slade summer prize in 1912, was set among the fields and meadows of his beloved Berkshire countryside. He was conscious of the rich religious significance of the place he lived in. Spencer observed that the driving force of his early career was "happiness and peace".
Spencer's style never quite managed to blend with contemporary influences. Perhaps it is for that reason that during his career (c.1910-39) he was not particularly commercially popular. His commissions, such as the Crucifixion scene at Aldenham school chapel, did not receive a wide audience.
A major retrospective of Spencer's work under way at Tate Britain in London is set to change that. It is a celebration of Spencer as a village chronicler, a "nostalgic ruralist" whose every fibre turned away from the depiction of suffering. Even when the British government commissioned him as a war artist during the first World War, after he had worked as a hospital orderly on the Macedonian front, he chose to paint a picture of hope. Although wounded soldiers lay in the foreground of the painting, the light coming from an operating theatre nearby comforts them.
Spencer, London Times art critic Richard Cork wrote, "turns his wartime experience into an image of reassurance, wonder and rebirth."
The end of the war marked the beginning of a period of great turbulence in Spencer's life. The 1920s and 1930s were chaotic times. He moved away from Cookham, married Hilda Carline in 1925 and in 1929 he met and became disastrously obsessed with the lesbian artist Patricia Preece. By 1937 he had left his wife, married Patricia and signed over his Cookham house to Patricia and her lover Dorothy Hepworth. His paintings reflected a growing fixation with sexuality.
But one of the most memorable paintings of Spencer's postwar period is The Resurrection, Cookham, on display at Tate Britain. It was Spencer's largest free-standing work and it took three years, from 1924 to 1927, to complete.
In The Resurrection a multiracial cast of figures lazily emerge from their graves in a Cookham churchyard, watched over by God and a Christ-like figure. Spencer is present in the picture, observing the scene. God appears to be blessing his first wife Hilda while Cookham residents wander through the churchyard smelling flowers or leaning against tombstones.
For Spencer, the painting represented a "state of joy, a state of being in love". It also displayed a sense of rehabilitation and recovery of the self after the horror of war. In his paintings, Spencer said, he wanted to stress "my own redemption from all that I have been made to suffer".
Critics have described Spencer's religious paintings, some of which are displayed at Burghclere chapel in Berkshire, as like coming across England's "cut-price version" of Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua. But as art critic Jonathan Glancey wrote, his mastery of English "whimsy" and earthy religious sentiment rooted in the magical Cookham landscape ensured Spencer was "occasionally profound".
Stanley Spencer exhibition at Tate Britain (020-7887-8000) until June 24th