In 1819 ill health forced him to return to Norwich, where lived for twenty years, before moving to Windsor in 1840, where he continued to produce landscapes.

Stark generally worked in oils, although his total output included etchings, watercolours and pencil and chalk drawings.

In 1834 he published his admired Scenery of the Rivers of Norfolk, which consisted of thirty-six etchings produced by specialist engravers after his own paintings.

His father Michael Stark was a Scottish-born dyer who had a considerable literary and scientific background,[2] and who ran his own dyeing business on Duke Street, Norwich.

One, dated 3 July 1814 and sent to Starks' house in London, contains a reminder to submit work to the Norwich Society of Artists' forthcoming exhibition.

During this period he began to sell paintings to wealthy patrons: both the Marquis of Stafford and the Countess de Grey bought works from him.

[13] During this period in his life he painted many pictures of the scenery along the Thames and in Windsor Great Park, producing images of trees that revealed his improved understanding of their structure.

[9] His Lambeth, looking towards Westminster Bridge (1818), now in the Yale Center for British Art collection in New Haven, Connecticut, provides an indication of Stark's initial technique, which Andrew Hemingway describes as "a fairly broad style comparable with that of his fellow pupils".

By 1825, the London Magazine was reporting that Stark's subject matter lacked development, tending as he did to base his works on the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael.

[20] By the mid-1830s, Stark had moved away from the influence of the Dutch masters and was producing paintings that showed nature less heavily and more freely.

[21][22] Not all his critics were pleased: the Norfolk Chronicle complained in 1829 of Stark's move away from depicting formulaic scenes towards a greater use of bright colours and more brilliant lighting effects.

Cromer, exhibited at the British Institution in 1837, is a good example of this new kind of work, and shows the influence of his friend William Collins and the Norwich artist John Thirtle.

[17] The article on Stark in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica noted that "his works charm rather by their gentle truth and quietness of manner than by their robustness of view or by their decisiveness of execution".

In 1817, when only twenty-three, he and his friend John Berney Crome had been praised in the Norwich Mercury "for their great and rapid strides".

[28] Stark taught his own son Arthur, as well as Alfred Priest, Henry Jutsum and Samuel David Colkett, all of whom emerged to become minor artists.

Arthur James Stark specialised in depicting landscapes and animals, and drew the cattle on a few of his father's pictures.