‘SPIRITUAL’ ART PRAISED
Picture of Christ painted by controversial B.C. society lady
Today Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels. But in his day, he was also well known for his interest in spiritualism — the belief that the living can communicate with the dead.
Sometimes, Doyle argued, a spirit could take hold of a living person and guide them. He suspected this was the case with a “marvellous” painting of Jesus that was exhibited in London, England in 1919.
It was called The Light, and had been done by an unknown artist named Mrs. Spencer. Her maiden name was Kathleen Emily Beaven, and she was born and raised in Victoria — the only daughter of B.C.’s sixth premier, Robert Beaven.
In a letter to the Daily Mail, Doyle praised the painting as “the finest head of the Founder of Christianity that has ever been conceived.” The Vancouver World reprinted much of the letter in stories on Jan. 2122, 1920.
According to Doyle, the painting had been executed “by a lady who, as I am assured by her family, has no power of artistic expression when in her normal condition. It is a supreme example of the working of spiritual intelligence through a material mortal frame.”
The artist’s mother-in-law said Mrs. Spencer’s gift was “psychical in origin.”
“She felt the desire to paint, and picked up her little daughter’s crayons,” said the Viscountess Churchill. “Although she had never received instruction in drawing or painting, she drew a perfect head of Christ on a piece of paper.”
Encouraged, she got some painting materials and let it rip.
“There is nothing in the nature of ‘control’ in her work,” said the Viscountess. “The remarkable thing about this head (in The Light) was that it was done upside down.
Mrs. Spencer worked at it solidly for about three hours, and when it was finished, wondered what on earth she had done: it was only on turning it upside down that a perfect head of Christ appeared.”
Doyle thought this was proof Mrs. Spencer’s hand had been guided by a force from beyond.
“When a masterpiece is produced by one who has no technical skill, and when it is exposed for all to behold, the most skeptical must admit that there is something there behind their ken,” he wrote.
Oddly, no one seems to have asked Mrs. Spencer what she thought. They didn’t even use her first name in the story — she was identified as being the wife of Victor Alexander Spencer, who went by Peter. Spencer was a British blue blood who was Winston Churchill’s cousin. When Kathleen Beaven married him he held the title Baron Churchill of Whichwood, and in 1934 he became the second Viscount Churchill. He scandalized the English aristocracy by becoming a socialist in the 1930s.
He was Kathleen’s second husband. Her first, British naval officer Stanley Venn-Ellis, was among 900 crew killed when the HMS Defence was sunk at the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916.
A month-and-a-half later, she married Spencer on July 15, 1916. But they didn’t wed for love — Spencer married Kathleen (who was 19 years older) to quell rumours spread by Spencer’s father.
Spencer’s dad had left his wife for another woman in 1906, and disinherited his son because he chose to remain with his mother, the Viscountess.
When Kathleen’s husband was killed, Spencer’s father spread rumours about his estranged wife and Kathleen Beaven. Upset, mom asked her son to marry Kathleen.
“If I married K it would settle everything and all the endless troubles would be over,” Spencer wrote in his 1964 autobiography, Be All My Sins Remembered.
“No one, my mother said, would go on believing the stories that my father had been spreading. Everything would be explained. It would be the most natural thing for my mother to be with her daughterin-law.”
So he married her, although he later declined to move to France with Kathleen and his mother.
“It was one thing to have a wife in another country,” wrote Spencer. “It was quite another to live in a house with a wife who was not one’s wife, someone to whom one would never have been married under normal circumstances.”
Kathleen died in Bath, England on Dec. 1, 1943 at the age of 72. The whereabouts of her painting of Christ are unknown.
Spencer remarried and died on Christmas Eve, 1973 at 83.