His First Grief, 1910
Charles Spencelayh studied at the Royal College of Art and also in Paris, winning a prize for figure painting. He was the father of the painter of miniatures, Vernon Spencelayh (b.1891). Most of Spencelayh's paintings are portraits or figurative genre scenes, much like this work, although he was also a successful etcher and miniaturist. He was especially famed for his cluttered interiors depicting old men, which he painted in great detail. Although this painting is of a young boy, it still concentrates on the themes of old age and death. This was a subject which would have been close to the hearts of a Victorian audience in the nineteenth century, and which was continued by Edwardian artists well into the twentieth. In a letter of 1940 to Vincent Galloway, then Director of the Ferens Art Gallery, Spencelayh noted that the boy in the painting, who acted as his model on several occasions, was tragically killed in the Great War in 1916.
