Hyde Park in Summer, 1931 (oil on canvas)

Stanley prepared initial studies and cartoon at home, Llwyn-On, and then moved to London to complete canvas during first few months of 1931. He knew Hyde Park well from his days at the Royal College of Art. summers day in central London. The composition was partly inspired by Seurat. Stanley admired Seurat's strong silhouettes “dark figures against the sky”, such as he had seen in Bathers at Asniers in the National Gallery. Stanley himself appears center stage, reclining, his sketching bag to hand. The models for the painting were mostly people Stanley saw in the park – “real people are often like that – groups of people enjoying themselves”. He visited the Park early each morning to sketch the down and outs who slept there at night. From numerous pocket book sketches Stanley worked his figure studies up at his lodgings in Earls Court. The man seated on the far right, reading, was Stanley’s father. Stanley sourced other figures from his pocket book, “Look at Albrecht Durer – he never left the house without a sketch book –recording a broken wall, a tree, a figure walking.” Some of the models Lewis used were from Newport. Many of the children were from Croesycieiliog. Mrs Roberts doing needlework (seated in red), Clifford Barry, one of Stanley’s students at Newport who Stanley considered to be a fine watercolourist, (seated extreme right smoking and mid left drinking from a flask). The old lady seated in profile on the left was a Royal College of Art Model. The fashionable lady holding an umbrella arm in arm with a gentleman in a top hat was Miss Muriel Pemberton, later head of fashion at St. Martins (a post she held until she retired). At the time Lewis was courting her; she glances back coquettishly towards him. Pemberton also served as the model for the seated central figure with the Chinese parasol which Stanley recalls going to buy as a compositional devise, to add colour, from Woolworths. The figure in a red beret holding Stanley’s bicycle is his sister Margaret. His young cousin Joan, (daughter of Aunt Sally) is playing with a hoop - she was also the model for the girl eating an apple in Allegory, Stanley's first attempt at the Rome Scholarship. The woman in light blue sitting on the ground and reading a book is a fellow student from the Royal College of Art. The woman seated to the center left, in blue, is Stanley's cousin Edith. As well as making hundreds of small sketches of Hyde Park Stanley also used his favourite box Kodak camera to record the Park, sometimes squaring- up the photographs. Hyde Park in Summer was also referred to by Stanley as simply The Park – Study for a large Mural Decoration.