Utmost Fidelity: Marianne and Adrian Stokes

Artists from all over Europe congregated in Paris and Brittany in the 1880s and amongst them was the Austrian Marianne Stokes who had spent five years studying in Munich, devotedly observing the Flemish and German Old Masters and absorbing the influences of Northern European literature. She met her English husband Adrian in Pont-Aven and he persuaded her to come and live in Cornwall where many other sympathetic artists worked. After about twelve years there they settled in London, making frequent trips abroad, notably to Denmark, Holland, and Austro-Hungary. Their paintings can be found in museums all over the world but often in storage. Speaker Magdalen Evans organised a touring exhibition last year, to mark the centenary of their illustrated travel book Hungary, which did not come to the South-East so this lecture provides the first opportunity for a London audience to see many images of their work.