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 islands of the Adriatic stretching into the sunset, is closely based on Stokes’s 1906 painting now in the Harris Art Gallery, Lancashire.

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).