Looking through Stanley Spencer's eyes

As part of his involvement in Absent Voices, our year-long project telling the creative story of Greenock's historic sugar sheds, Rod Miller is following in the footsteps of Sir Stanley Spencer.

Spencer, a quintessential Englishman, was sent as an official war artist to Port Glasgow to document the shipyards of on the Clyde during the Second World War.

At the weekend, Rod climbed up to Port Glasgow Cemetery, in search of the view which Spencer painted. Spencer's oil painting, Port Glasgow Cemetery, painted in 1947, is now in the collection of the British Council.

Rod's photo of Spencer's view is on the right hand side of this image.

He explains: "The painting was obviously done from a higher elevation. Nowadays, a hedge is in the way, but I managed to get some pictures with the aide of an upside down wheeley bin!

"This picture was taken from within the cemetery itself. The tall oblong headstone centre left of the painting is now on it's back."

According to the Tate's website, between 1940 and 1946, Spencer painted a series of pictures on the theme of shipbuilding on the Clyde for the War Artists Advisory Committee.

In May 1940, the artist visited Lithgow's shipyards at Port Glasgow where he made drawings on which the first of the shipbuilding series was based.

He made other visits to Port Glasgow between 1940 and 1945. Later Spencer wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘One evening in Port Glasgow when unable to sleep due to a jazz band playing in the drawing-room just below me, I walked up along the road past the gasworks to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope...I seemed then to see that all in the plain were resurrecting and moving towards it... I knew then that the resurrection would be directed from this hill’

The result was this painting...