The artist was self-taught, and pioneered the use of decorative iridescent panels in the 1930s, painting in a pointillist manner over panels gilded with gold, thus achieving extraordinary effects of light that are richly decorative. His paintings have the serene simplicity of his contmeporary, the American artist Maxfield Parrish. Wbeley was once commissioned to paint the elaborate interiors of a Maharajah’s cars.

He lived and worked predominantly in Bath with a brief spell painting from a studio in Clapham, London.