Spencer, Stanley Sir RA
Shipbuilding on the Clyde: The Furnaces
1946
painting
© crown

This painting was the last in the 'Shipbuilding' series completed between January and March 1946 from a study made in May 1940. Spencer had begun to lose interest as he became involved in the 'Resurrection' series at the end of the Second World War. The War Artist's Advisory Committee was being brought to an end and Muirhead Bone pressed Spencer to produce a central panel to conclude the series in February 1946. The canvas size was reduced so that he could finish it sooner, much to Spencer's regret. In a letter to Daphne Charlton in May/June 1941, Spencer discusses ideas for the 'Furnace' painting, which was completed five years later: 'The Furnace scene is big & important in its pictorial sense, but that is not enough. In the sheep & cow farming in Switzerland, there was that ceremony of praying as the sheep went by themselves back up into the mountains. But I would prefer something not so formal or...artificial. Religion as I mean it is implicit in everything as a heaven passing through everything...Love & passion, religious or sexual is the only thing I wish to express & anything I undertake must assist me to that end. I am sure I shall find a way of 'getting my own way' in this painting, as I did at Burghclere.' (868) Related drawings: LD 6008 13, LD 6008 32, LD 6008 64, LD 6008 66 (verso), LD 6008 68, LD 6008 93, LD 6008 98, LD 6008 105, LD 6008 131

image: A group of furnace-men pull a red-hot steel section from the furnace in the background. Foreground left is a collection of 'dogs' used as pins set into the perforated floor to hold the template in position, around which the angle iron would be bent. A man tends the furnace in the upper left of the composition, and a pile of angle iron appears in the upper right.

IWM Reference: IWM ART LD 5781