Christ Preaching Gets a Closer Look: Conservation at the Stanley Spencer Gallery
Measuring some 536cm in width by about 206cm in height – roughly 18 feet by 7 feet – Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta stands among the largest and most ambitious works by Stanley Spencer. Completed only in part at the time of Spencer’s death in 1959, the painting has long been hung high in the gallery.
As part of the new exhibition Revealing Genius, Conserving Art: Stanley Spencer’s Final Masterpiece, the canvas has been carefully lowered and placed at eye level for the first time in over a decade, enabling visitors to appreciate its scale, detail, and the subtlety of Spencer’s technique.
During the exhibition, a conservator from the Courtauld Institute of Art will work live on the piece, revealing underdrawings, changes of colour, and the thinness of the paint layer—shedding new light on Spencer’s working methods and the painting’s unfinished nature.
This remarkable conservation project, and the fresh perspective it offers on one of the 20th century’s great unfinished paintings, was featured in The Times in November.
Visit the gallery to see the painting up close and discover for yourself the hidden craftsmanship and vision behind Spencer’s final masterpiece.
The Stanley Spencer Gallery is partnering with Gainsborough’s House to present a major exhibition of the works of one of England’s greatest twentieth-century painters, Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959).
The most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Stanley Spencer in a decade will open at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury this autumn, before transferring to the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham from April 2026. The partnership between the two museums will feature over 20 works from the Stanley Spencer Gallery presented alongside major loans from Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, and other public lenders, as well as rarely seen works from private collections.
The exhibition will travel to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, where it will be on display from 4 April to 1 November 2026. This leg of the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore Spencer’s deep emotional and artistic ties to Suffolk from the heart of his beloved Cookham. It reveals how Suffolk’s coastal landscape and Spencer’s complex relationships, particularly with Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece, shaped some of his most poignant and visionary paintings. Visitors will encounter rarely seen portraits, intimate drawings, and evocative scenes such as Southwold (1937), which reflect both joy and introspection.
The exhibition will also highlight Spencer’s imaginative project, ‘The Church House’, offering insight into how memory, love and place were interwoven in his spiritual and artistic vision.
This major exhibition curated in collaboration with Gainborough’s House will focus on the artist’s work in Suffolk, where he married Hilda Carline in 1925, and returned to a decade later.