Once called "the greatest inspired painter since William Blake",[1] Henry Stockley was arguably the most important primitive artists active in the period 1930 to 1960.
Alan Clutton-Brock, art critic of The Times, was particularly impressed by his handling of figures and his ability "to give its proper atmosphere to a landscape and keep a number of curious and unexpected colours in harmony with each other".
The terrace and the interior of the Stockley house were recorded in the Channel 4 documentary on Eynsford, where we are shown one of his younger sisters, Florence Martin, at the very end of her life.
just dirt ones at first...Our father was a master plumber but owing to ill health wasn't always able to work, so Mum did needlework, sometimes took in washing to make ends meet!
[citation needed] Like so many, Stockley was deeply affected by World War I, never forgetting the friends in the Kent villages who had died.
He started at Reigate, Surrey and was eventually transferred to Swanley Bus Garage, his base for the rest of his working life on the buses—32 years 11 months, from 1925 to 1957.
He did not enjoy driving buses, hating the long hours, cold, discomfort, eyestrain, poor wages, berating the management and feeling isolated.
He drove throughout the Second World War and recorded what he saw in a series of Blitz paintings, two of which survive: Saving St Pauls and London.
[citation needed] His children, Helen the younger daughter, and Henry the only son, have early memories of their father executing a painting.
[citation needed] Stockley, his daughter recalled, was very outspoken in his views and a man of principle, regarded by his children and grandchildren as kind.
[citation needed] After his wife's death, Stockley's behaviour became increasingly eccentric, and he eventually was admitted to Mabledon, a psychiatric hospital in Dartford where he died in 1982.
Stockley's work first attracted public interest when he was exhibited in a one man show by Lucy Wertheim at her Gallery in Burlington Gardens.
Her encounter with Henry Stockley is memorably told in her autobiography, Adventure in Art [Wertheim, 1947:37–38]: When I saw the artist stoop down, collect his paintings and begin to roll them into a bundle again ...
Alan Clutton-Brock, art critic for The Times, reviewed Stockley's work sympathetically in 1932, writing of his use of 'curious and unexpected colours' 'working in harmony to create atmosphere in a landscape', his 'curiously expressive' drawing especially of the human figure, and his originality of invention.
A painting, Evelyn Laye in Hyde Park was shown in The Listener in that same year and this work is now in the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, and was last exhibited in a travelling show in 1992.
[citation needed] The press, with exceptions like the Times, and later the Daily Worker, generally treated Stockley's work either as simple-minded or as yet another deplorable example of the stupidity of 'modern art'.
Stockley was deeply hurt by this hostility, especially by a Sunday Times review of 1932 which failed to find any positive qualities and talks of an "evident lack of technical ability" and "unsophisticated imaginings.
"[citation needed] In 1938 Stockley's work was shown at the now-famous exhibition of Unprofessional Painting at the Bensham Grove Settlement, Gateshead-On-Tyne alongside the Ashington Group, the so-called Pitmen Painters, which attracted the interest of a number of leading left wing intellectuals of the 1930s [Feaver, 1985:77–79].
[citation needed] While Stockley, as his letters show, was unsympathetic to most contemporary art, he was certainly seen by collectors in the 1930s and 1940s as a modern artist, even if in a naive mode.
Their illustration [Coneys, 1933, as yet untraced] is in dull monochrome: Stockely's dazzling and unusual colours are shown in a dusty grey.
"[citation needed] His letters only passingly mention other artists, but include scathing comments on Graham Sutherland coupled with his own wish to design work for cathedrals.
He is a colourist of subtlety and daring and, as the Times critic pointed out, has the power to give ordinary things a symbolic strangeness.
Such paintings as The City Saved 41, depicting Saint Paul's in the blitz, are a vivid, painterly response to historic events.
This, together with his championship by Jack Bilbo, secures Stockley a small but unique corner in the history of art in the twentieth century.
He continually produces images that surprise us with their remarkable originality, handling paint with energy and complete absorption in his medium.
"[citation needed] It is crucial to an understanding of Stockley to appreciate the personal as well as historical context in which he produced his remarkable work: his poverty, the almost total lack of leisure, the very long hours of arduous and difficult effort involved in bus driving, particularly in the 1930s and during the War, the hostility of most critics, and above all his isolation as an artist in his working world.
[citation needed] In 1966 he wrote to Lucy Wertheim who, at the age of eighty, has asked to see him to discuss a Trust and his series of Bunyan Paintings she had first shown in 1932.
He was 74: I am what you might call finished – I have no correspondence – I go nowhere except in summer time ... no freedom – no chance to meet anyone outside of family – and now it is bitterly cold here & I am off to bed in the warm if I can keep warm – Form your Trust and forget me ...[citation needed]There is never any doubt as to the genuineness of a Stockley: all his paintings are signed, usually twice, often boldly on the reverse, in capital letters, painted by Henry Stockley.
He often incorporates his name or initials into the painting itself so that HSS appear in odd places, hidden in buildings, buses, hedges, and railings.
Jimmie Hume, Lucy Wertheim's son in law, transcribed a number of Stockley's letters to his patron and these are a key source of information.