Remembrance Sunday: Stanley Spencer - Map Reading

Twentieth Century English war art has had a profound affect on me down the years. That inter-war generation of artists are the foundation of my aesthetic, and the inhuman and brutalised aspect of pictures of the Flanders front speaks to me. I don't think that's quite right for Remembrance Sunday though, so here is a picture where the humanity of the participants is still intact.

Here in Salonika, half a continent away from the mud which usually dominates British depictions of the war, a patrol rests amongst the flowers while their officer, on horseback, consults a map. One soldier feeds the the horse while others fettle their kit, doze or pick flowers and berries. The little moments of domesticity, the pauses, the menial chores were the things the soldiers lived for, the blessed relief of the ordinary and the quiet.

Spencer spent six years beginning in 1927 producing a whole suite of paintings of his memories of service in Macedonia and in hospitals for a chapel dedicated to the forgotten dead. The Sandham Memorial Chapel is at Burghclere near Newbury and the scenes are, as with much of Spencer's work, treading a line between the domestic and the religious and they avoid depicting the fighting itself. Many of the pieces are set in mess halls and hospitals. Spencer wanted to remember the people, not the war itself.

The chapel is being restored at the moment, so the paintings have come to London. "Heaven in a Hell of War" is at Somerset House until 26 January.

Tomorrow, Armistice Day itself, I will take you across the North Sea to Germany for very different but equally human reaction to the war.