Spencer was a wildly uneven painter, but a genius at his best, and he deserved better than the rather poor, tendentious biography written by Maurice Collis in the 1960s. Born in the pastoral village of Cookham on the Thames, the son of a music teacher, he was a prize pupil at the Slade but the Great War disrupted his entire world, and Spencer's military service - first as an ambulance man, later in the infantry - marked him for life. His period of greatest fame as a painter was in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Burghclere church murals are probably his finest achievement. Marriage to Hilda Carline ended in divorce, and his infatuation with Patricia Preece led to a second marriage which apparently was unconsummated and cost him heavily, both in money and humiliation. Mr Pople can now reveal that the consolatrice of his later years was a young married pianist of German birth, Charlotte Murray.