Joseph Whiting Stock was an American artist renown for his work with portraits, especially oilograms as they were known, paintings of dead people and in particular children. Joseph Whiting Stock was born in 1815, some reports say 1818, in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.
price range information: Most works priced $20,000 to $70,000 and worked in oils and pastels.
What I enjoy most about Stock is that he had to overcome tremendous obstacles just to get by, and yet he persisted in being an artist. The artist was horribly injured when he was eleven and this accident made him a paraplegic. The artist had a special wheelchair to allow him to travel about to paint.
Below a great clip from my favorite the wonderful Antiques Roadshow. A guest appears with a painting she thought was by another artist. In the end it turns out to be by J.W. Stock.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/201203A34.html
Never married.
He did keep a journal that I highly recommend for funny insights.
I like to think of Stock as a Victorian era painter for his attention to the way he painted carpets, furniture, children holding small objects, and pets.
Stock was self taught and is sometimes classified in the folk art or primitive art genre.
For his bread and butter income of the oilograms, Stock would spend the winter prepping canvases. He might paint the crib and all but the face. Later he would be asked to do a commissioned work he would already have 90% of the work finished!
I also think of Stock as a precursor to the hand and foot painters of modern times. People who overcome tremendous difficulties with their motor skills just to make art.
Stock passed away in 1855 at the age of forty after contracting the disease tuberculosis.
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