The Times Monday 2nd December 1935 

Mr Adrian Stokes RA, RWS, died in London at 6.30 on Saturday at the age of 80 after a short illness. He was a Senior Academician.

Best known as a painter of decorative landscapes of mountain scenery in Tirol, Charles Adrian Stokes was born in Southport in 1854. His father, of whom he was the third son, was Mt Scott Nasmyth Stokes, an inspector of schools, the first Roman Catholic to hold that post after the repeal of the legislation prohibiting Roman Catholics from holding Government office. One of Mr S N Stokes’s colleagues was Matthew Arnold. Adrian Stokes had interesting connexions. His great-great-uncle had two daughters; one married George Stanley Faber, and the other was the mother of Charles Reade, the novelist, one of whose stories Stokes illustrated as almost his first commission. He married in 1884, Marianne Preindlsberger of Graz, Austria, who, as Marianne Stokes ARWS, is well known for her imaginative paintings and illustrations of peasant life, of children in particular. She died in August 1927. He had as brothers the late Mr Philip Stokes, a successful barrister, who became a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn; the late Sir Wilfred Scott Stokes, inventor of the “Stokes gun”: and the late Mr Leonard Stokes, the architect, designer of Chelsea Town Hall and at one time President of the Royal Society of British Architects. Mf Ffolliott Stokes, the artist and writer on Cornish subjects is his cousin.

Stokes was first intended for the Navy, but, owing to a change of Government, a nomination procured for him by the late Lord Denbigh came to nothing, and he entered the office of a cotton broker in Liverpool. After a few months, however, the call of art became imperative, and he moved to London entering the Royal Academy Schools. In 1876, the year in which he exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy, Stokes went to France, settling at Pont-Aven, in Brittany, for the serious study of landscape painting. Among the works produced in the next few years were “A Winter Afternoon in the South of France” and “The lonely Road”; the latter bought by Mr Arthur Lewis, bringing him two commissions from Sir Henry Irving. From 1885 to 1886 Stokes was in Paris, studying under Dagnan-Bouveret. After a short visit to Denmark Stokes settled in the artistic colony at St Ives, Cornwall, where his more characteristic style began to be apparent. “Upland and Sky,” bought for the Tate Gallery out of the Chantrey Bequest Fund, belongs to this period, but it is in a later Chantrey purchase that the peculiar qualities of the artist are fully expressed. Stokes was elected ARA in 1910 and full RA in 1919.

The progress of Stokes was from careful naturalism to decorative abstraction, mainly through colour. His mountain landscapes, though not very robust in design or in the treatment of form, are full of enchantment, particularly when, as was often the case, they were painted in autumn, with the silver birches in golden dress patterned against the blue hills, or golden reeds against a blue pool. A little remote from the ordinary practice of landscape in this country, but without subscribing to the structural emphasis which came to us from the more recent movements on the Continent, they are to be looked on as poetical rather than intellectual abstraction from Nature; and, allowing for a certain monotony in their variations on the theme of blue and gold, they seldom failed to give a thrill of pleasure when encountered in the exhibitions of the Royal Academy or the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours - for Stokes was at home in both mediums and had a special affection for tempera. Stokes painted in Spain, Holland, Ireland, and Capri, but Tirol provided him with his most characteristic designs. The pictures he exhibited in the Academy this year, however, were in a slightly different vein from his more familiar work. The were “A Pond, Noon,” “Where the rooks rest at Renvyle,” and “Ragusa.”

Last year a great deal of comment was caused by Stokes’s interruption of the speech of the Prime Minister (Mr MacDonald) at the Royal Academy banquet. Mr Macdonald was referring to the achievements of the government when Stokes interjected : “Why not say something about the present exhibition?” Afterwards he said that he made the remark because speakers, year after year, ignored the great efforts represented around them in the galleries and treated artists as if they were not worthy of consideration. As was to be expected Stokes was strongly criticized for his action, though, on the other hand the were those who thought he was justified. Sir William Lewellyn, PRA, said “Mr Stokes should not have done it. I think it was very indiscreet of him. It was most fortunate that people were amused rather than annoyed. They all laughed and the Prince of Wales was very much amused………Mr MacDonald was undoubtedly going to treat the present exhibition as the last part of his speech. The interjection came before he was able to reach it.”

Stokes’s writings deserve mention. In 1909 he published a book on Hungary, and he contributed articles occasionally to The art Journal, The English Landscape magazine, and The Artist. His “Landscape Painting,” published in 1925, is an excellent work of its kind particularly in its analysis of methods of the great landscape painters of the past. Stokes had no children, but is survived by nieces and five nephews. The will be a short Requiem Mass at Farm Street Church, Mayfair, at 11 a m tomorrow, and the burial will take place immediately afterwards at Mortlake Cemetery.

PHR.

24 November 2005.