In New York Maiden Lane by John Stobart, men roll carts, drive horse-drawn carriages and chat in the shadows of a triple-masted schooner. Light shines from a lamp pole and out of the windows of an old sail loft, illuminating the wet cobblestone street in the early morning. New York’s East River is filled with schooners and tugboats with more city beyond. The scene is almost photographic in its accuracy, yet it’s completely imagined.
Stobart, a British-born artist whose meticulously researched oil paintings of 19th-century harbors and tall ships earned him a reputation as one of the world’s foremost maritime artists, died in March. Russel Jinishian, a gallery owner in Stonington, Connecticut, who knew Stobart for 40 years, recently reminisced about his friend and this painting.
“We look out on New York Harbor today and see it with speedboats and all, and Stobart looked out and saw it as it was in the 19th century,” says Jinishian. His ability to create scenes with such precision demonstrates his mastery of painting and his understanding of sailing vessels. “The architecture has to be right,” says Jinishian. “The ships, the people, the perspectives and the light have to be right. He was able to do all those things and that gave his paintings a quality that nobody else really could match.”
Born on December 29, 1929 in Leicester, England, John Stobart was raised in Derbyshire, a landlocked county. Despite this, he was fascinated by ships and the ocean during visits to his grandmother’s home in Liverpool. There he observed the city’s bustling docks with his full attention.
Stobart studied at the Derby School of Art and then the Royal Academy School in London, but his time there was cut short when he joined the National Service. After traveling by boat to visit his father in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia—a journey that introduced him to a variety of ports and shipping vessels—Stobart decided to focus his painting career on maritime scenes.
Towards the end of his life Stobart lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and continued to paint up to two weeks before his death at the age of 93. “As Stobart said, ‘I don’t want to be a starving artist, you know?’” Jinishian recalls. “He wanted to be successful. And he was.”
This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue.
