Stanley Spencer was an English artist. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Fine Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. As his career progressed, Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid, he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites. His art has been the subject of exhibitions at institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts and Tate in London; the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; The Hepworth Wakefield; and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.