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.
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