Almost all of the great writers on art have been artists. Some have been great artists. Others have given most of their time and commitment to being artists, but more or less undistinguished ones. Some have been writers primarily who have produced art that is interesting only for those interested in them personally or in their writings. Others have been writers primarily who have produced art which could be interesting for those knowing nothing of them or of their writings. Ruskin is a clear case of this latter category, as is Artaud. And Stokes seems to be of their number.

He did not begin painting until about 1935, when he was in his mid-thirties and had some of his finest books behind him. For the first twenty years his pictures were the work of a sensitive amateur. But then a way of painting crystallised, above all in his still lifes, which produced some of the most beautiful and personal paintings of appearance done in England in the twentieth century. That is not a vast claim to make in a French publication; it is a claim that Stokes is decidedly a minor artist, but also an authentic one, an exquisite one and a poetic one. The poetry was that of painting whose manner and matter overlapped with those of both Bonnard and Giacometti but was as English as that of, say, Ben Nicholson (with whom Stokes regularly played tennis - good tennis).

However authentic it gets to be, however moving for others, performance on a violon d'lngres inevitably embodies less of the performer's being than finds its way into his primary means of expression. The qualities in Stokes's writings that do not appear in his paintings include some of the most potent. Take this passage from the chapter called 'Gasometer and Tower' in The Invitation in Art (1965):

There is nothing in the paintings of the spirited metaphor, the mordant wit, the shockingness (which, like the rudeness of Oscar Wilde's gentleman, is never unintentional), the celebration of unconscious fantasy, the constant awareness of the drama of bodily functions, the Pateresque preciosity of language, the rich variety intricate rhythm.

What the paintings do have that is deeply characteristic of the man is a search for truth that is patient and brave, a pervasive fastidiousness of style, an unceasing sense of the transience of things and the threat of their loss, a profound respect for silence, and an attitude to art which made Beethoven intolerable, Schubert a touchstone. In painting, Stokes said, he had always been something of a conscientious objector. He amplified that remark in a statement about his painting which he wrote in I968:

In an attempt to say something about what the paintings do do, I shall focus on the typical still lifes. In these arrangements of glass jars, bottles, decanters and so on, the forms of the vessels echo each other mutedly, not in the way a gathering of terracotta pots in actual space will do, sonorously, roundly, the form of one celebrating the form of another, one separately apprehended for a time but soon absorbed again into the play between one and others, voices in imitation, mingling and companionably reverberating.

It is as if Stokes, this full-throated choir in mind, looked, with a need for fastidious obliqueness, for a way to reduce the song, to distill it, to a whisper - or rather to something less portentous, say a discreet murmur. To this end, as it were, he diminished substantiality and space and shape. There, the excessively sonorous reverberations of the pots depends on the reaction to light of terracotta's opaqueness, thickness, dryness, earthiness; here, in Stokes, is a presence of transparent forms that look weightless, belong with water and air. Again, there, the sonority of the pots depends upon the positioning of those substantial forms in a space generous enough in depth to give room for an echo to be picked up from one by another; here the illusory space is rigorously shallow, the forms in it given a minimum of breathing-space. Again, there, the sonority depends on the affirmation of shape, on the observer's grasping the form of a form as surely as if he were firmly holding it; here the forms have a symmetry and a simplicity signifying clarity, only the clarity is contested and dispersed by the vaporous atmosphere in which the forms are poised, a luminously murky greyish-bluish-greenish-yellowish space that seems rather denser than the things it envelops.