Christopher Redknap: A Lifelong Love of Stanley Spencer's Art

Chris Redknap was born in 1940 in Steventon, Oxfordshire, and began his teaching career in 1961 at Cookham Dean Primary School, School not far from Cookham Village, Stanley Spencer’s ‘Village in Heaven’, and where the Stanley Spencer Gallery was to open in 1962. This marked the beginning of a lifelong love of Spencer’s work. A gifted teacher, he went on to establish the Teachers Centre in Maidenhead, a vibrant hub where he encouraged and enhanced the skills of those around him with infectious enthusiasm.

A keen friend of the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Chris visited often and organised group visits, sharing his knowledge and passion for Spencer’s work even after moving to West Sussex. In 1998, the year of his retirement, he attended the Stanley Spencer Studio Sale at Christie’s and acquired the sketches offered here. He exhibited them in their entirety at the Studio Plus Gallery in Seaford in 2019 in support of a local charity. He passed away last year, and these works he so carefully preserved remain a lasting reflection of his passion and generosity.

Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959)

Born into a large musical family in Cookham, Berkshire, Spencer grew up surrounded by parish life, church music and the routines of village life that would inform his work throughout his career. When he entered the Slade School of Fine Art in 1908, his tutor Henry Tonks reportedly described him as possessing one of the most original minds the school had encountered. His marriage to Hilda Carline, herself a gifted painter, became one of the most significant relationships of his life, her presence continuing to haunt his work long after their separation in 1937.

For Spencer, drawing was inseparable from thought, memory and belief and was at the very heart of his practice. The works offered here were all acquired at the landmark Christie’s Spencer Family Collection Studio Sale in 1998 and span much of his career. He worked constantly on whatever came to hand, scraps of paper, envelopes, the backs of invitations. His daughter Shirin recalled that he always began with the eyes, drawing outward with carefully sharpened pencils, his shading building form rather than merely describing it (see Lot 137). These works are not simply preliminary studies, but the starting points for what Spencer called his ‘notions’, ideas imagined as chapters within a larger book. Rooted in the people and places he knew, they were then worked up into more complex compositions. As Shirin and her sister Unity recalled, each drawing was complete in itself. Whether a rapidly sketched idea or a more developed study, they demonstrate his remarkable ability to transform observation, memory and feeling into images of  extraordinary concentration and conviction.

Other Highlights from the Collection

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Auction Details

Lots 132-149 | Works from the Collection of the late Christopher Redknap sold to benefit the Sir Stanley Spencer Memorial Trust 

Wednesday 8 July 2026, 10.30am BST
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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