Introduction

Adrian Stokes — aesthete, critic, painter, and poet — was born on 27 October 1902 in Radnor Place, Bayswater, London. A life of enduring enquiry produced over twenty critical books and numerous papers; paintings of a mysterious iridescence that, he maintained, 'project an armature of the architectural effects that mean everything to me', and, in his later years, poetry with a personal astringent rhythm. ¹ A letter to the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, signed by eighteen prominent thinkers and artists including William Coldstream, Barbara Hepworth, John Golding, Lawrence Gowing, Henry Moore, Herbert Read, David Sylvester, and Richard Wollheim claimed Adrian Stokes as among 'the most original and creative [...] writers on art'. ² Stokes's writings sustain and extend the evocative English aesthetic tradition of Walter Pater and John Ruskin, illumined by a personal sensibility to the consolations of art and architecture, and the insights given by psychoanalysis.