FROM the distance of 50 years since his death, Stanley Spencer stands as one of the English greats of 20th-century art.

And so it is hard to believe that three of the 26 oils, watercolours and sketches assembled for this Tate Liverpool retrospective – now on tour at York Art Gallery – had once met with rejection, either by the artist himself or the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition selection panel.

Judgement of art is always subjective, but the verdicts of Spencer and the London arbiters of taste now look baffling on the evidence of the three mighty works presented for the first time in York.

The Bridge, an oil on canvas from 1920, is notable for its muted, harmonious palette of colours – such a contrast to the heraldic tones in the more famous Swan Upping (1915-1919), here set against the terracotta of the gallery’s back wall.

The bridge in his Berkshire home town of Cookham has been transformed from iron to stone for a scene of people packed sardine-tightly as they watch the annual regatta. Faces are flattened and monolithic, noses noble and necks broad and the buttoned suits are as repetitive as the unusual posture of arms that runs against the human grain.

It comes as a shock to read York Art Gallery curator Laura Turner’s note that Spencer considered the painting to be a failure. Apparently a friend had to intervene to stop him destroying the canvas. The friend was right, Spencer was wrong.

Thirty-five years later, Spencer was the one in the right, venting his frustration at the Royal Academy hanging committee rejecting his submissions for that year’s Summer Exhibition: his 1934 work The Dustman (Or The Lovers) and St Francis And The Birds, the 1935 oil with the peanut shell-shaped head and bearded chin of St Francis that has become so synonymous with Spencer that it forms the exhibition poster. Spencer’s fury at the Royal Academicians’ verdict led him to resign from the committee in protest.

Both works are typical of Spencer’s fusion of Biblical events with his own experiences. In The Dustman, the resurrected dustman is reunited with his wife – interestingly much the bigger figure in the painting, as she bears his weight – in a Last Judgement scene where a utilitarian teapot, cabbage leaves and empty jar take on a sense of sanctity.

Likewise, the inspiration for the figure of St Francis – the patron saint of animals depicted talking with enraptured birds – was his father’s habit of feeding ducks and hens in his dressing gown.

The Spencer exhibition has been shown already at the Tate Liverpool and Laing Gallery in Newcastle, but has been reconfigured by Laura Turner, chronologically wherever possible, but also collated by theme, with illuminating new notes and observations by Laura.

“I particularly like just how vivid Spencer’s imagination was and how he was able to portray that in his painting, and how he was driven by his ideals,” says Laura.

“In terms of what people will get out of this exhibition, I think it’s the incredible range of work: his religious pieces, his portraiture and his landscapes. He may have felt frustrated by having to paint landscapes, which he did as his potboilers, when he couldn’t pursue his artistic ideals out of financial necessity, but what you see in Spencer’s work is art reflecting life.”

Her observations for each painting are well worth taking the extra time to read, full of golden nuggets as you absorb artwork that spans Spencer’s college days at the Slade – when he would travel daily from his home to London, hence his nickname of Cookham – to his final, vulnerable self-portrait in 1959.

Painted in the pain of cancer in his final year, while staying with friends in Dewsbury, it has the ambience of the gallows: the once warm brown eyes of his first self-portrait (displayed nearby) have dimmed to palest grey, his flesh tones are those of rotting fish.

Aptly, it is the last image of an exhibition higher on quality than quantity, but sufficiently broad ranging to convey Spencer’s skill in portraiture, nudes, Biblical scenes and his (reluctant) cash cow, the landscapes that helped to satiate the financial needs of family and second wife alike. Only the war years are undernourished in their representation.

“We’re not trying to attempt a retrospective, but to show a selection of his work from the Tate’s collection as I don’t think we would be able to do justice to a retrospective in this space. So we’ve worked with the Tate and Laing Gallery to achieve an exhibition that is a cross-section of his art,” says Laura.

Unique to the York exhibition is The Deposition And Rolling Away Of The Stone, a 1959 piece in the style of a Renaissance altarpiece, presented to York Art Gallery by the Venerable Dean of York, Eric Milner-White, in 1963, and newly brought out of hibernation in the vaults.

Displayed on its own, it stands out anyway, with its imagery of near-naked soldiers wrenching nails from Jesus with pliers and hammers and the Virgin Mary foregoing the traditional plain blue for pink stars as big as those on the American flag. Below a dividing strip of wood, soldiers are curled up like balls, and the tomb echoes the cylindrical shape of the drainage pipes that Spencer had seen being lain in Cookham.

The spirit of Stanley Spencer, the painter who would push his paints and brushes through Cookham in a pram, is alive 50 years after his death, never more so than in the heat of the stove behind a glum, flaccid, naked Spencer: a figure of dejection and rejection, hunched over the prone but elusive Patricia Preece, her eyes averting his gaze in Double Nude. The marriage was never consummated, but it is said she bled him of his money: a case of she screwed him, but he didn’t…

• Stanley Spencer: Fifty Years On runs at York Art Gallery until April 19. Opening hours are 10am to 5pm daily and admission is free.