There are 35 paintings by 20 different artists hanging on the walls of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. This is one of four landscapes by Adrian Scott Stokes, which were arranged in a row beneath portraits of King George V and Queen Mary in the Dolls’ House Saloon. Stokes, who began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1876, was already well established on the English art scene, although this was his first royal commission. 

Stokes’s paintings were inspired by the plein-air practices of contemporary French landscape artists, as well as by the variety of beautiful landscapes he saw on his travels around Europe. This work, depicting the blossoms, Cyprus trees, white houses and glittering waters of the Sicilian city of Ragusa, does not seem to be based on any of Stokes’s full-scale paintings. He often adopted a similar composition, however, positioning an architectural structure or some other focal point in the background, separated from the viewer by a body of water.

The following year, Princess Marie Louise invited Stokes to contribute a work on paper to the Dolls’ House Library, for which he produced a delicate watercolour seascape (927408).