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Inspired by viewing the Paleolithic murals found in the caves of Altamira in northern Spain, N.H. Stubbing's hand-print paintings came to prominence in the late 50s earning him an international reputation. In Paris he showed at the avant-garde gallery, Galerie Iris Clert, as did his friend Yves Klein. In New York he exhibited with Martha Jackson. In the early 1960s stubbing began to attract the attention of the museum director Alfred Barr and critic Herbert Read. The latter wrote of Stubbing's paintings made from hand prints "the work of art must be, not a projection of or from an existing state of feeling, but rather an extension of consciousness itself, the creation of an object that awakens new feelings, that adds a facet, however minute, to the slow crystallization of experience into beauty" (H. Read quoted in N. H. (Tony) Stubbing Retrospective, exh. cat., London, 2000, p. 9). Read also chose a work by Stubbing as the final image in his influential book, A Concise History of Modern Painting, published in 1960.

Stubbing's works are represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, Paris and the British Museum, London.