MARGARET Stokes never made headlines as an artist, though I seem to remember her as an exhibitor with the long gone Dublin Painters.

A cousin of Mainie Jellett, she studied in Edinburgh as well as in Dublin and for many years taught in Alexandra College.

In short, she had the background - social and academic of so many Anglo Irish women artists of the time.

With nearly 80 works, this retrospective exhibition is in some danger of running to seed, but in fact many or most of them are small and the oils are outnumbered by watercolours, pastels and woodcuts.

Apparently Margaret Stokes learned the latter technique in Scotland and she became highly adept at it; the tree and animal studies are direct and strong, and the female head A Dubliner is full of character.

Pastel is another medium in which she was fully at ease in, personally I wished for more of these.

Her basic idiom was "straight" and old fashioned, at times conventional, with typical plein air effects and a good eye for light.

This comes over best in the watercolours, but there are interesting oil pictures too - Terenure College Grounds, for example, which has, an air of intimacy mixed with loneliness, and The Dodder.

She seems to have travelled abroad to the usual places, France and Italy, but apart from her Dublin subjects there are also pictures painted in Galway, Down, etc.

A religious painting, Calvary, is no better or worse than the average academy picture of 40 years ago, while the occasional forays into abstraction or semi abstraction, obviously under the influence of jellett, "are also very much of their period."