Lot 227: Frank Wilbert Stokes (1858-1955)

MOONLIT ARCTIC SEASCAPE WITH A WHALE
oil on canvas
34 x 44 in. (86.3 x 111.7 cm.)

The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., sold Christie's London, 25 September 2001, lot 22 (£2,585)

FRANK WILBERT STOKES (1858-1955)
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Stokes studied under Eakins in Philadelphia, under Girtme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the ateliers of Colarossi and Julien in Paris. The five following years were spent in France and England before Stokes returned to the United States in 1892. Almost immediately he was employed by Scribner's magazine to accompany the Peary Relief Expedition to Greenland in 1892, and so started his unique career as an artist working in the polar regions.

PEARY'S NORTH GREENLAND EXPEDITIONS, 1891-92 and 1893-94
Peary had set out on his second Greenland expedition in 1891, the Kite leaving the American explorer and his shore party at McCormick Bay on the north-west Greenland coast where they would winter before setting out across the ice-cap in May 1892. The Kite, with Stokes in tow, returned to relieve the expedition on 24 July 1892, Peary and Astrup finally appearing from the twelve-hundred mile sledging journey across the great interior ice-cap on 6 August. Peary had crossed North Greenland to Independence Bay, reaching a farthest north of 820 latitude, 340 west longitude on 4 May 1892, and in so doing had discovered the northern limit and insularity of Greenland, key progress towards the discovery of a route to the North Pole, Peary's ultimate objective. The Kite steamed out of McCormick Bay for home at the end of August, docking in Philadelphia on 23 September. Stokes had spent eight weeks in the Arctic, the first painter to work on the icefields where he had to learn a method as he went, mixing kerosene into his pigments to stop them freezing and sketching outdoors through indistinguishable Arctic days and nights.

Based in his studio at Bowdoin Bay, Stokes would spend fourteen months in all working in this extraordinary Arctic environment: 'The outside winter temperature was frequently forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The lowest temperature experienced was frequently sixty-five degrees below zero. In order to prevent his colours from freezing, [Stokes] mixed them with petrol and poppy oil and kept his colour box in a deerskin bag. Lieutenant Peary's general orders forbade any member of the party to go more than a quarter of a mile from the main camp. This restriction was relaxed in the case of Mr. Stokes, who frequently went four or five miles in moonlight or starlight, during the polar night, to study effects which he had declared to be indescribable in words, but which are shown by his pictures...' (Exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute Museum of Arctic and Antarctic Pictures by Mr F.W. Stokes).

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