Adrian Scott Stokes

Who was Adrian Scott Stokes?

Charles Adrian Scott Stokes RA was an English landscape painter. Born in Southport, Lancashire, he became a cotton broker in Liverpool, where his artistic talent was noticed by John Herbert RA, who advised him to submit his drawings to the Royal Academy. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1872 and exhibited at the Academy from 1876.

From 1876, travelling to Fontainebleau and Barbizon, he came under the influence of French plein air landscape painters including Jules Bastien-Lepage. He also painted genre works and portraits influenced by Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais and Parisians such as Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Together with his wife Marianne, he spent the summers of 1885 and 1886 at Skagen in the far north of Denmark where there was an artists' colony which became known as the Skagen Painters. There the couple struck up a close friendship with Michael and Anna Ancher.

After an extended stay in France, the couple returned to England where they settled at Carbis Bay and joining the artists' colony at St Ives in 1886.

Adrian Stokes was a landscape painter, concerned most with atmospheric effects, and later with decorative landscapes. He was the author of 'Landscape Painting'. He became ARA in 1909 and RA in 1919, won medals at the Paris Exhibition and Chicago World Fair, became first President of the St Ives Society of Arts and Vice President of the Royal Watercolour Society.