Like his friends James Archer and G. D. Leslie, Storey was among the many artists who felt the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1850s, although his later work is more conventional, reflecting his membership of the St John's Wood Clique. In his autobiography, Sketches from Memory, he recalled how Millais's painting The Carpenter's Shop (Tate Britain) 'startled the art public of England' when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850, how many people, himself included, 'saw in it the advent of a great artist', and how this masterpiece and other work by Millais that followed - Mariana, A Huguenot, Ophelia, etc. - 'sent all the younger men to nature', thus doing 'more than o...