Henry John Stock, RI, ROI

(British, 1853-1930)

Influences

Footnotes

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1905, no. 707.
Tokyo, Bunkamura Museum of Art, The Victorian Imagination, 1998, no. 65. (Subsequently Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Daimaru Museum, Kobe, and Tsukuba Museum of Art, Ibaraki).

Born in London, Henry John Stock was virtually blind as a child but overcoming this adversity he completed his education at St Martin's School of Art and subsequently at the Royal Academy Schools. He was later taken on by the wood engraver and radical W.J. Linton, with whom he made a visit to Italy. Stock would go on to exhibit in London from 1874 at the Royal Academy, also at the Grosvenor Gallery, and at the the Royal Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, of which he became a member in 1880. He became best known for his imaginative and symbolist works, which took their subjects from literature or were invented entirely by the artist, taking influence in this type of work from William Blake and George Frederic Watts.

These influences can clearly been seen in the present work, a slightly sinister subject depicting a woman who has momentarily put down a book she has been reading to stare vacantly into space. She seems unaware of the three threatening male figures that extend their arms towards her, touching her clothes. Although Stock was widely read, and particularly loved Dante, Coleridge, Goethe and Walt Whitman, the symbolism of this work appears to be entirely of his own invention. The present oil is the definitive version of the subject. Stock showed a similar watercolour at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1904.