The Home Front is now among Lewis’ best-known works. The unfinished painting bears testament to how the war interrupted and forever changed life in Britain.

Lewis never sought the limelight, content to be a professor and working artist. In 2002, when Lewis was 96 years old, a new audience would discover his work when for the first time, an exhibition of his wartime paintings and drawings were shown at Newport Museum and Art Gallery.

The painting is one of the only known works to document the full range of Newport's Civil and Volunteer Services in action at the outbreak of World War II.

The models for the picture were students at the Newport School of Art and auxiliary service personnel including firemen, firewatchers and hospital doctors and nurses.

John Sampson, a student at the Newport School of Art at the time, remembers:

"I recall Mr Lewis working on the painting during school terms. The canvas was not on a stretcher or supported by any of the usual means. To the best of my memory it was flat against the wall which divided the antique department from the life study room.
The high ceiling and walls of the antique room allowed the canvas to hang full length and at a height to leave the bottom third to be worked on seated.

The project became an art lesson in itself to students who would often gather in small groups to observe Mr Lewis at work.”

Lewis took the incomplete painting with him when reporting for duty in 1941; it remained folded up throughout the war, through VE day, and through nearly a dozen different houses Stanley and Min called home over the next 50 years.

In 2001, a visit to Lewis’ studio by Newport Museum and Art Gallery Keeper of Art Roger Cucksey, arranged by Stanley Lewis's daughter-in-law, the author Mary Mae Lewis, resulted in the discovery of the long lost, damaged painting nailed to the wall of Lewis’ damp barn in the quiet town of Kington in Herefordshire.

Lewis generously donated the painting, along with 27 preparatory drawings and watercolours, to the museum.

On November 11, 2002, Newport author Leslie Thomas unveiled the restored painting in Newport Art Gallery at a reception including the Mayor, Councillor Bob Poole and Jessica Morden MP.