ABSTRACT
The Euston Road school of art was the brainchild of Graham Bell, William Coldstream, and others associated with the London Group of artists who, in reaction against "the problems of abstraction" and "the orgies of Surrealism", returned to the post-impressionism of Cezanne. Earlier that year Bell and Coldstream had written what, in effect, amounted to a draft of the school's prospectus. In it they said that, having experimented with abstraction, they had decided that "the only aspect of painting that is really engrossing is the exploration and experience in paint, by actual experience, of the material world". Adrian Stokes had meanwhile spent part of that summer, 1937, painting again in Provence while staying there with Eddy Sackville-West. For Stokes this was not so much a return to realism as consistent with his by then longstanding emphasis on the inspiration of art by the objective reality of the external world rather than by inwardly-given romanticism or transcendentalism.
