Few artists are as rooted in a place as Stanley Spencer and his beloved home village of Cookham. This Thames-side village was not only his birthplace, his home for most of his life, and even his nickname, but it dominated his imagination and was the inspiration and location for many of his greatest paintings. This lecture will look at Cookham’s place in Spencer’s art, and how it was central to his unique vision of English domestic and spiritual life.

Dr Amy Lim is an art historian and curator, specialising in British fine and decorative arts from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. She is curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and of the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, and a tutor at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. She was recently an exhibition researcher at Tate, contributing to British Baroque: Power and Illusion (2020) and 'Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920' (2024). Amy has degrees in History and Literature & Arts from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She runs an online art dealership, and has published articles and essays on a variety of art-related topics from gothic garden monuments to female patronage.

This celebrated picture demonstrates Turner's commitment to classical landscape, as well as his passion for experimentation and interest in the modern world.The painting is interpreted as a celebration of travel and new technological power, with the railways representing the convergence of technology and natural forces. These elements create an emotional tension associated with the overwhelming power of the sublime. The thrilling essence of speed was an innovative factor of life, with the power to alter our emotions of nature, while the steam of the locomotive provided a groundbreaking atmospheric scenery.Turner was not painting a factual view of the Great Western Railway, but rather an allegory of the powers of nature and technology