Utmost Fidelity: The Painting Lives of Marianne and Adrian Stokes
Penlee House, Penzance, 19 September– 28 November, and the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 19 September–21 November
The first thing that needs pointing out is that the artists reviewed here were a husband-and-wife team painting around the turn of the 20th century, with no connection to the art historian and painter Adrian Stokes (1902–72) who came on the scene later. Marianne Stokes was Austrian, her husband English, and they met in the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven in 1883. They married in Marianne’s home town of Graz and spent much of the rest of their lives together travelling and painting through Europe. Marianne worked in tempera and concentrated on portraits and devotional subjects, while Adrian was a landscape painter. Both were interested in plein-air naturalism but also in intensifying this form of realism and making a more lasting and profound impact on their viewers. Both achieved this in different ways.
Marianne had a great gift for portraiture, perhaps best exemplified by ‘Candlemas Day’ (c.1901), a Dutch girl in profile with rosary and prayer book seen against a tall lighted candle and green glass. Compare it with the exquisite Holbeinesque portrait of John Westlake, a co-founder with Ruskin of the Working Men’s College. Both have an unusual sensitivity married to an unerring sense of design. These are qualities that feature in her best-known work, the ‘Madonna and Child’ (1905), which was chosen for a first-class Christmas stamp in 2005. The realism of this depiction is challenged by the hieratic flatness of the Madonna’s body and the pattern of thorny briars behind her. Yet the effect of the image is not at all compromised; in fact, it is enhanced by the sacrifice of naturalistic modelling.
Adrian’s early work is highly competent but could be by any number of skilled European landscape painters with a penchant for atmospheric effects and an eye for the telling composition. Altogether more individual are the small informal panels he made, such as ‘Silver Birch Trees’ against a pale sky, or ‘Dutch Landscape’. Adrian had an un-English eye for colour used vibrantly but not distortingly. Look at his ‘Marazion Marshes’ (c.1892), a brilliant organisation of blues and ochres. Compare this with ‘Autumn in the Mountains’ (1903), strong but subtle, or the more ornate ‘Wild Cherry Trees of the South Tyrol’ (1902), with its autumnal flame-red leaves and black sheep.
For my taste, Adrian is the more inventive and enjoyable of the pair. He could conjure a wonderfully limpid atmosphere, soft and dream-laden, as may be seen in the majestic ‘Islands of the Adriatic’ (1906). His use of colour and pattern continued to be unusual and memorable, for instance in his modern-looking ‘Sunset in Provence’ (1927), and he was particularly good on trees and the shapes made by their dancing trunks.
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