B.

The search by many late nineteenth-century European painters for ‘picturesque’ peasant workers going about their everyday lives led to the establishment of artists’ colonies in coastal or rural settings. Rather than an ‘authentic’ local, however, Adrian Stokes modelled his painting of a young shepherdess walking up a windswept dune on his wife, Austrian-born painter Marianne Preindlsberger. The couple had met at the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, in 1883, and married in the following year. Stokes painted this during their stay at an artists’ colony in Skagen, a fishing village on a rugged peninsula at Denmark’s northernmost tip, where they spent the summers of 1885 and 1886.

(Leaving for work, 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)