Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958) was an English painter of portraits and humble domestic scenes. It’s the latter subject that I find I can pour over for ages, just studying all the mundane objects that are painted in great detail.
For instance, a spent match discarded on a floor, envelopes & letters stashed behind a picture hanging on a wall, a collection of mismatched china on a shelf, a glass case containing taxidermy or a painting within the painting.
Here’s an observation made by Aubrey Noakes in his 1978 book, Charles Spencelayh and his Paintings. The author could just as easily have written these comments in 2018:
Much of Spencelayh’s work now appears to me to possess a nostalgic quality about it. The agreeable clutter of inherited possessions, common enough in most households early this century, and even between the wars, is becoming more and more of a memory as people find themselves crammed into flats and pressured into the purchase of modern purpose-built furniture.
Spencelayh first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1892 (he exhibited more than 70 paintings here over his life), initially showing portrait miniatures of women. He was one of the founder members of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters.
It was only years later that he began painting his more recognisable lone elderly men in living quarters and workshops.
In the early 1920s Spencelayh was ‘discovered’ by a Mr. Joseph Nissim Levy, a Manchester cotton merchant who’d bought a painting of his entitled Cinderella while holidaying in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Levy and his wife, Rose had previously viewed other works by Spencelayh at the Royal Academy, but they’d already sold.
An Academy exhibition attendant furnished Levy with Spencelayh’s home address and that’s how the relationship between the artist and his patron began. After a while, Levy offered Spencelayh and his wife a house in Manchester rent-free and also offered to double the amount of money Mr. Spencelayh was earning at the time.
Levy enjoyed watching Spencelayh work and suggested several Jewish subjects for him to paint. These consequent works sold successfully. Levy also commissioned portraits of his family members and arranged for 23 of his paintings to be exhibited at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. However, it was the patron’s purchase of several of the artist’s important paintings for sums as high as £600 and £700 that was most valuable to the latter.
Charles Spencelayh had a few other prominent fans including Evelyn Waugh and Queen Mary; the latter for whom he painted a miniature portrait of her husband, King George V to go into her dolls’ house.
There are 176 examples of Spencelayh’s work in the permanent collection of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester – the artist’s birthplace.
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Additional image credits:
Sotheby’s
