Spencer was an English painter, one of the most original figures in 20th-century British art. He lived for most of his life in his native village of Cookham, which played a large part in the imagery of his paintings. Spencer was a prize-winning student at the Slade School (1908–12) and served in the army from 1915 to 1918, first at the Beaufort War Hospital in Bristol, then in Macedonia.

He was appointed an Official War Artist in 1918, but his experiences during the war found their most memorable expression a decade later when he painted a series of murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire (1927–32), built to commemorate a soldier who had died from an illness contracted in Macedonia. In his time Spencer was a celebrated figure, his greatest public success having been The Resurrection: Cookham (1924–6, Tate, London), which when exhibited in 1927 was hailed by the critic of The Times as ‘the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century’. Spencer was again an Official War Artist during the Second World War, when he painted a series of large canvases showing shipbuilding on the Clyde (Imperial War Mus., London) that memorably capture the heroic teamwork that went into the war effort. His career culminated in a knighthood in the year of his death.. His younger brother Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was also a painter of imaginative subjects and landscapes, working in a style close to that of Stanley.

(c) The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)