The Furnace Man
Stanley Spencer (1891–1959)
Worthing Museum and Art Gallery

Transcript

The Furnace Man was painted by Stanley Spencer sometime between 1940 and 1944 it’s a portrait of a proud working man created as part of Spencer’s ship building on the Clyde series during World War Two, and it shows the face of Frank Chalmers being lit up by the fire from the furnace. And he’s got a cloth cap on his head and quite a warm expression on his face. You can see the flames of the furnace reflected on his skin. In the background, there’s quite a plain brick wall, and next to it a shovel for shovelling the coals into the furnace. This was painted when Stanley Spencer was a war artist, and he was commissioned by the war artists advisory committee to depict the ship building efforts in Glasgow, and it was very much about a painting that was aligned with Stanley Spencer’s ideas of the dignity of Labor and the sense of the spiritual in everyday life.

He looks a lovely man. Looks very nice, natured, he really does, and he looks like a hard worker. This man appears to be a member of the fat he appears to be a member of the family community of the very ordinary people in the painting of the Harbour Crowd. He’s the same type of person.  I get the impression that he’d know them and they know him. He comes across as a thoughtful person who likes peace and solitude as well as liking service, liking servicing the needs of the community.

I love the look of concentration on his face. He’s, completely at one with what he’s doing.

He’s got laughter lines and big, heavy crow’s feet that are really highlighted by dirt and ash. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he reminds me of one of my granddad’s I’m like, Oh, look at him.

I think the sense of the friendship between the artist and the man really comes through. And Stanley Spencer got to know Frank Chalmers quite well during his time in Glasgow.

I think he could be considered a beautiful man, you know, even though he’s working hard and yeah, sometimes you see someone and you’re just so taken with how they look at that moment, and it looks like the artist has managed to capture that.

There’s another aspect that this painting reminds me of, because, because you can see that the fire of the furnace reflected in his face. It made me think about the Greek myth of Prometheus and of the gift of fire to humanity, there’s a real sense of his connection with fire is dangerous, but it also has the power for transformation and creativity. And he’s making something that is really important to the time, you know, building ships in for the war effort. In the Greek myth, there’s a sort of twist. Zeus, the king of the gods, as it were, was very much against humanity having fire. So Prometheus gave fire to human beings against Zeus’s wishes and so he punished Prometheus by kind of chaining him to this cycle where an eagle would come and eat his liver every night. And because he was immortal, he would regenerate by the morning. The myth sort of reminds me of the price to pay for industrialisation. And it seems to say there’s something about that in the painting, I think, yeah.