JOHN STOBART (1929-2023)
John Stobart grew up in Derby, England, but when he was eight years old, a visit with his mother’s relatives in Liverpool found him engrossed with the bustling activity along the waterfront as ships plied the River Mersey on their way to and from the Irish Sea. This seed planted during his youth would influence the direction of his art and he became one of the most celebrated and financially successful maritime painters in the late twentieth century. Eschewing modern trends, Stobart pursued his passion by producing carefully crafted, often romanticized scenes of old-fashioned clipper ships at the heights of their power, which made their way into the collections of museums and important private collections around the world.
While young Stobart struggled with his schooling in traditional subjects, he had an innate creativity his pharmacist father could not ignore, and thus he helped his son gain entrance to the Derby College of Art when he was sixteen years old. There he was afforded foundational studies in drawing and painting, supplemented by visits to galleries and museum in Birmingham, England, where Stobart became enamored with the work of John Constable. After finishing his studies at Derby, Stobart moved to London to round out his education at the Royal Academy Schools between 1950 and 1957, a period interrupted by two years’ service in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955. Following this stint, the young artist made his first steamship voyage when he received word from his father that he was getting remarried in Zimbabwe. This trip, and more so the return journey along the east coast of Africa, afforded Stobart valuable firsthand experience of seafaring life, the mechanisms of different vessels, the diverse architecture of numerous ports, and the changing color and patterns of ocean currents under variable lighting conditions. It also sparked a lucrative idea in his head to create paintings for British and Canadian shipping companies of their ships docked at exotic locations, which he began making on speculation and soon on commission. He completed his studies in London and moved to Canada by 1957, where he continued in this vein of work for almost a decade. By 1966, realizing that the vessels he had painted were being replaced by less visually appealing container ships, he changed his focus to historic American clippers, learning all he could on this subject through his friendship with Alan Howard, curator of the Toronto Maritime Museum. Having finished several pieces, Stobart headed to New York seeking gallery representation, and found it through Kennedy Galleries, which gave him his first solo exhibition in 1967. Stobart’s paintings were thoroughly researched, using archival photographs and etchings as reference tools not only in depicting the famous vessels but also in recreating the bygone architecture and arrangement of historic ports. Confident in the direction of his work, he moved to America by 1970, initially staying in Tarrytown, New York, before eventually settling in Darien, Connecticut.
