Edward Stone

Edward Stone has painted in France and also in Italy, but the greater number of works in or near his long-standing home base in Dorset. While all the paintings from France are landscapes executed en plein air, the two other locations have yielded still lifes or interiors as well as nature pieces.

Dorset subjects in Stone's work have mostly been confined to a small stretch of countryside, lying to the west of the county not far from the village of Toller Porcorum, within walking distance of the rectory where his father, the celebrated wood engraver and painter Reynolds Stone lived for many years. It is an area of rolling meadowland, punctuated by thick ancient hedgerows and sporadic scrub and bog which has been farmed almost continuously since Neolithic times.

With this tranquil region Stone is as intimate as was John Constable with the Stour Valley around Dedham and East Bergholt, or Henry David Thoreau with the woodlands and lakes near Concord, Massachusetts. In the light of such familiarity, engendered over more than a half century, it is perhaps not surprising that little of Stone's landscape work conforms to traditional norms; here is not information but feeling, association, memory, filtered through green sanctuaries, glimpses of downland framed by trees that are old, trusted friends, almost a vision of a quintessential Englishness suspended in time, some echo of 'The old lost road through the woods'.

The still-lifes and interiors Stone constructs and then paints in his cottage are as simply and subtly organised as his plein air landscape work seems shaped by random, headlong, passionate encounters with surrounding woodland, streams and meadows, and would seem at first to occupy another world altogether.

In the paintings executed in France, in Picardy and the Poitou, Stone demonstrates his skill with the smaller-scale oil sketch, perhaps an echo of his fondness for Corot and Valenciennes: compositions with woodland and water (nature's equivalent of his much cherished mirrors), full of energy and breeziness. In the Italian work, painted in Sicily in summer, there is stillness, languor, sensuality, allowing the viewer to glimpse another aspect of the artist's sympathy for the Southern European tradition.

Biography

Edward Stone was born in Berkshire in 1940, eldest son of the distinguished wood engraver and painter Reynolds Stone and a descendant of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was educated at Hammersmith College of Art, where he studied mural design. After college he worked as an assistant to the muralist George Mitchell. Later Stone worked part time as a day care officer in the Health Service, supporting himself while beginning a long process of discovering painting.

In 1980 Stone was a contributor to the Gallery's theme exhibition, Women Washing and seven years later he participated in Now, Fair River..., an exhibition inspired by the River Thames and shown at Hay's Wharf, London. In 1989 his work was shown in Blue and White: Still life on a classic theme by contemporary painters and in 1995 he contributed to the Jazz Exhibition. In 2000 he took part in The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust, shown the following year at the National Theatre and in 2006 in Everyone Sang: a View of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by Twenty-five Painters of Today. Edward Stone has held one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2000, 2003 and 2007.

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