In 1866 he showed a Battle of Trafalgar at the Intercolonial Exhibition at Melbourne, to which a W. Crowe also lent a fruit study by ‘E. D. Stuart’. The Bride’s Boudoir and The 'Great Harry' conveying Henry VIII were shown with the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1873 and two paintings on the lives of the Stuart kings were auctioned at Bendigo in 1871. At the Geelong Mechanics Institute in 1857 fruit studies by ‘Stuart R.A.’, lent by R. Bullock, were also apparently by him since the same spurious claim to him being ‘William E.D. Stuart R.A.’ was repeated in his funeral notice when he died of pneumonia on 25th October 1873 at Bendigo. He was buried in Sandhurst Cemetery in a pauper’s grave. His unfinished painting of Pall Mall from Bull Street, Bendigo (c.1860) was presented to the Bendigo Art Gallery in 1887 by the Sandhurst School of Mines and shows his studio signboard on the extreme left.

If the marines attributed to him (e.g. the Trafalgar in the Foundling Museum) are by him, then his style was very similar to his father’s: this does seem odd, however, since his fruit-and-flower work suggests he was a much more polished practitioner in that area and that there is some confusion between the two to resolve. Fruit (1854) in the Preston Park collection at Stockton-on-Tees may be a work shown at the RA in either 1854 or 1855 and is the only such still-life by him in a UK holding.

Pieter van der Merwe and Osmund Bullock, from census and registry data; the biography of William Stuart at ‘Design and Art Australia Online’ (daao.org.au).