Marianne Stokes
(1855 - 1927) |
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decorative biblical and medieval subjects, costumed female figures Art Work
| Name: |
Marianne Stokes |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Graz, Styria, Austria |
| Nationality: |
Austrian |
| Birth: |
1855 |
| Death: |
1927 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
decorative biblical and medieval subjects, costumed female figures |
| Medium: |
tempera |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Writing
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Biography
Born in Austria, Marianne Stokes trained in Munich and Paris. In 1884 she married the painter Adrian Stokes. The couple settled in St Ives, having befriended Stanhope Forbes. Stokes' early works were oil paintings influenced by the French realists Bastien-Lepage and Dagnan-Bouveret (the latter had taught her). They include The Passing Train (c.1890. Private Collection), in which a woman laborer, working in a field, stops to watch a locomotive steaming past, representation of the collision of the ancient rhythms of rural life with the speeding machinery of modernity. From the 1880s, Stokes exhibited in Britain at the Royal Academy, the New Gallery, the New English Art Club and the Society of Lady Artists.
During the 1890s Stokes began to paint decorative biblical and medieval subjects, often with costumed female figures, and to work in gesso and tempera, becoming a member of the Society of Painters in Tempera alongside Mary Sargant Florence. According to the painter and critic Harriet Ford, writing in the Studio in 1900, two aspects of Stokes's childhood affected her work: being given an illustrated copy of Grimm's fairy tales, and experiencing the mysticism of Catholic ceremonies. Ford argued that although Stokes delighted 'in all delicate and dainty means of expressing the thought, she yet never descends to triviality, to mere "prettiness"', and linked her to the Symbolist writer Maeterlinck. Stokes found another admirer in the writer Alice Meynell, sister of Lady Elizabeth Butler, who wrote about her for the Magazine of Art in 1901- More recently, her work was seen alongside that of Elizabeth Forbes in the exhibition Women Artists in Cornwall 1880-1940, held at Falmouth Art Gallery in 1996.
Stokes did not confine herself to painting. She wrote Hungary (London 1909) with her husband, illustrated with her paintings of figures in traditional dress. And in 1912 William Morris's company made a tapestry to her design (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester). A text woven into the border in German reads (in translation). 'Honor to the women who braid and weave heavenly roses into earthly life'. |
Samples of Work
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