Henry John Stock trained at the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited at the Academy and elsewhere for many years. He seems to have earned his living painting portraits, although his real interest lay in imaginative subjects expressed in a style which suggests the influence of William Blake and G. F. Watts. With Blake he may have felt some special sense of identity. Like Blake, he was born in Soho, and he lived latterly at Felpham in Sussex when Blake had spent the years 1800-03 under the patronage of William Hayley.
